Kelsey reeder (She, her, hers)
Currently serving as a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist in Private Practice, as well as a PhD candidate, Graduate Research Assistant, and Teaching Associate at Columbia University School of Social Work.
Kelsey has a passion for research, advocacy, and clinical work that centers racial justice and the liberation of queer and gender-expansive youth and adults. Her research interests include: [Primary] Subverting social work education and practice through lenses of queer irreverence and mess: exploring how social work is taught and carried out in ways that position social workers as sites of social control within their own communities, as well as how this impacts the personhoods of the clinician and client, interrupts collective liberation by enforcing unidirectional healing, and stems from settler colonialism and white supremacy; [Secondary] Clinical practice with the expansiveness of queer and trans identity: non-normativity as a roadmap; Queering research through community-based participatory research: problematizing the professionalism of care practice within queer and trans suicidality and death.
While earning her MSW at Columbia University, Kelsey studied religious trauma, intimate partner violence, and family acceptance within the LGBTQ+ community. During her time at Columbia, Kelsey completed a clinical internship at an LGBTQ+ youth organization, conducting long-term individual and group psychotherapy. Following graduation, she worked as a Crisis Worker on a lifeline, providing suicide intervention and crisis counseling for LGBTQ+ youth across the US, and then moved into a therapeutic social work position in Therapeutic and Medically Fragile Foster Care. During Kelsey’s two years working in the foster care system, she co-founded an LGBTQ+ Collective to conduct trainings for staff and foster parents with the goal of creating more hospitable and affirming environments for LGBTQ+ youth in care. Kelsey then spent three years serving as a School Social Worker in schools with upper elementary and middle school students. Within this organization, Kelsey supported the creation of a SOGIE Committee (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression), which strives to empower the lives and work of the organization’s staff, youth, and families across the gender and sexuality spectrums.
Kelsey is contracted by The Trevor Project to provide clinical group supervision to the Crisis Workers currently serving on the lifeline, text line, and chat line. From April 2017 to June 2020, she served as a Co-Chair of NASW-NYC's SOGIE Collective, for which she remains on the Steering Committee.
