Alisa Adams, LPC, M.A. Art Therapy and Counseling

Owner and Creator

Waterways Relaxation app was created by a counselor who realized while she worked in a men’s prison, that an interactive mobile activity using digital nature imagery can be soothing to those who can’t access nature.

Alisa Adams has 20 years experience working as a counselor in a variety of settings.

Alisa studied studio art classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia College in Chicago, and Northwestern University.

Alisa was an Art Therapy Intern at the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital Child Life Department where she worked with child psychiatric and other medical doctors while earning her Master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She lived in Santiago, Chile for a year, where she led art therapy workshops for professionals’ personal development, together with Chilean psychologist Paz Gomez Walker.

While in Santiago Alisa led daily art therapy activities for adults with disabilities in a day treatment program, and volunteered at a Center for children with disabilities, leading art activities.

Alisa also taught English to business professionals in Santiago.

Alisa traveled to Puerto Montt, in the Lake District of Chile, to provide art therapy for girls in a shelter, recovering from abuse and neglect.

After her return to the U.S., Alisa was a clinician in Phoenix Public Schools working with elementary and middle school students funded by the Safe Schools Healthy Students grant.

She was trained in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics in person by

Dr. Bruce Perry in 2008, while working as a clinician at a residential and day treatment facility for children and adolescents in Denver.

Alisa led the Houses of Healing curriculum in a men’s prison where she taught mindfulness and meditation and led art therapy activities in men’s mental health groups.

While working full-time for 3 years in prison as a Social Worker/Counselor III, Alisa taught a visualization (that she created for herself decades earlier when she had trouble sleeping) to prisoners whom she met with individually. Prisoners reported back to Alisa that the visualization helped them to relax in their cells. When the Department of Corrections gave tablets to all of the prisoners, Alisa realized that the visualization she created could be digitized and built as an interactive emotion-regulation app. Alisa was inspired to provide a soothing tool to people in distress.

Alisa was motivated to build the Waterways Relaxation app in 2020 when the whole world was told to stay indoors, and many people felt stuck and could not access nature.