Sondra Rosenberg
Sondra Rosenberg is an artist and art therapist based in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. She studied visual art at Oberlin College and earned her MA in art therapy at NYU. For the past two decades, she worked as an art therapist at a treatment center for women with eating disorders and related mental health struggles, guiding patients through a process of accessing and finding visual language for their inner worlds. Her own artistic practice has been deeply influenced by this approach, emphasizing expression, transformation, and the tension between structure and fluidity.
Her work is an exploration of how internal states manifest outwardly. She is drawn to the interplay between monochrome and color, rigidity and messiness, stillness and movement, containment and release. She does not limit herself to a single medium, instead choosing whatever best captures a particular emotional or conceptual resonance. Sometimes this means paint; other times it is a combination of pencil, pastels, watercolor, text, and found objects. The materials shift, but the intent remains the same—to give form to the intangible, to externalize emotion, to create a fixed visual expression of an evolving mental landscape.
Rosenberg creates art for personal expression, in support of social justice and community development, and for private commissions with a focus on custom portraits of houses, pets, and people. Her work is as varied as her influences, yet a common thread connects it all: an interest in how surfaces reveal deeper truths, how images can hold history, memory, and feeling in a single frame.
Her years of work as an art therapist have shaped her understanding of art’s power to heal and transform. Whether in her own pieces or in guiding others, she sees art as a process of discovery. The act of creating is not just about producing an object but about engaging with one’s own inner world, allowing something unspoken to take shape.
For Rosenberg, success is not measured in numbers or recognition but in whether a piece resonates, whether it speaks to someone on a deeper level. Her goal is not simply to depict but to connect—to offer an image that invites reflection, that sparks an emotional response, that allows the viewer to see something of themselves in it.
Through her work, she continues to explore the shifting relationship between interior and exterior, between control and spontaneity, between the self and the world around it. Her approach remains open, intuitive, and ever-evolving, always guided by the belief that art is not just something we see but something we feel.
