Artist and Founder of Liberation-Based Therapy
Tanisha Christie, MA, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, founder, artist, and storyteller working at the intersection of mental health, culture, and systems change.
She is the Founder and CEO of Liberation-Based Therapy, an independently built, seven-figure mental health organization providing culturally responsive, trauma-informed care across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Under Tanisha’s leadership, LBT has grown into a multidisciplinary practice serving hundreds of children, adults, couples, and families each year through a team of more than 25 therapists.
Tanisha founded Liberation-Based Therapy from the belief that mental health care cannot separate people from the social, cultural, political, and relational conditions shaping their lives. The practice centers communities that have often struggled to find care that fully recognizes their identities and experiences, including Black and Brown communities, immigrants, LGBTQIA2S+ people, creatives, activists, and individuals navigating complex trauma, chronic illness, and major life transitions.
Her clinical orientation is relational, experiential, systemic, and deeply informed by liberation psychology. Before founding LBT, Tanisha worked in complex trauma case management at Mount Sinai Hospital, supporting vulnerable and chronically ill patients as they navigated fragmented systems of care. She completed her clinical training at Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work and was selected for the Diversity in Social Work–Family Systems Program at the Ackerman Institute for the Family.
Tanisha leads LBT’s continued development as a clinical, educational, and systems-building organization. She oversees organizational strategy, clinical education, therapist development, strategic partnerships, and the creation of new approaches to care coordination and continuity. She is the creator of Self in Practice™, a training framework that invites therapists to examine how identity, power, personal history, and subjectivity enter the therapeutic relationship. The framework challenges the myth of clinical neutrality and helps therapists understand themselves as active participants in the work of healing.
A Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses alumna, Tanisha is also developing new tools and models that expand the possibilities of care beyond the traditional therapy session. Her work explores how people can retain greater ownership of their health information, strengthen continuity across fragmented systems, and remain connected to meaningful resources between appointments and during major transitions in care.
Before becoming a therapist and founder, Tanisha spent more than two decades working across the arts, education, activism, and community-based organizations. She is an award-winning interdisciplinary performing artist and filmmaker whose work has appeared throughout the United States and internationally, including on Amazon Prime and iTunes, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and other arts foundations. That lifelong engagement with narrative, embodiment, identity, and public dialogue continues to shape how she understands healing, leadership, and human connection.
Across her work as a psychotherapist, founder, educator, and artist, Tanisha creates spaces where people can tell the truth about what has shaped them, reconnect with their own knowledge, and imagine something beyond survival. She believes meaningful transformation requires more than helping people adapt to existing systems. It also requires building systems capable of seeing, supporting, and responding to the whole person.
Books & Media
Self in Practice™
An introduction to a clinical education framework examining how therapists’ identities, lived experiences, power, and humanity shape the work of therapy.
Human After All
Liberation-Based Therapy's podcast about the emotional realities of being human, including work, relationships, creativity, grief, ambition, healing, and the complicated lives we build around them.
Listen to Human After All
You Are Creative
A reflective guide for reconnecting with creativity as an inherent human capacity rather than something reserved for artists.
Explore You Are Creative
Iona Flies Away
A musical coming-of-age story exploring Black girlhood, family silence, sexual trauma, relationships, resilience, and one young woman’s journey toward self-determination.
Read Iona Flies Away
Listen to Iona Flies Away: Songs from the Play on Apple Music