Dee Preston-Dillon, M.A., Ph.D.
Dr. Dee Preston-Dillon founded the Center for Culture and Sandplay in 1999 to offer clinicians training to integrate cross-culture dimensions into Sandplay therapy. In 2020, she cofounded The Sand Therapy Training Institute (TSTTI) to provide training, consultations, retreats, and professional mentoring. Her Maryland studio is organized around an extensive library of symbols and designed solely as an immersive training space. The work at TSTTI is international, training therapists through both virtual and in-studio immersion.
With a master’s in humanistic counseling, and a doctorate in psychology, her life’s work has focused on innovating projective therapies and clinical training. Dr. Dee is especially interested in extending the therapist’s imagination, deepening therapeutic process through metaphor and symbol activation.
Emerging from her research into indigenous responses to sand scenes and over four decades of clinical practice and clinician training, Dr. Dee has developed Narrative Sand Therapy© as a means of addressing gaps in Sandplay and Sandtray therapies. Her approach, grounded in social construction, narrative therapy, and existential experience, incorporates the stories and voices of the symbol’s perspective. At the foundation of this approach is a collective projective process, a focus on the phenomenological experience of three energies in the clinical space, the client, the therapist, and the symbols. Narrative Sand Therapy is a collaborative exploration between client and clinician, a hermeneutic circle to understand and respond to emergent meanings. This process is anchored in the therapist’s heightened presence, enhanced safety, active imagination, process hypnosis, and wonderment.
Dr. Dee has taught at graduate and undergraduate universities and colleges (e.g. John’s Hopkins, Loyola, University of Hawaii) and presented on the clinical use of symbols and sand at over 50 national and international conferences. Consulting with clinic staff and small groups, her workshops emphasize clinician immersion and awareness; explorations to process and deepen insights, extend one’s ability to resonate with client representations, and facilitate stages of process.
Currently a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland Global Campus and on the graduate adjunct faculty at the George Washington University Art Therapy program, Dr. Dee continues her research into the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and existential dimensions of symbol process.