Adrienne Sacks was born in 1994 in Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a multidisciplinary visual artist with a Bachelor of Arts in Clinical Psychology and Studio Art from Tufts University and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she was the recipient of a Juror’s Choice Award and a first place award in graduate research across the university for her thesis project concerning anthropomorphism, aesthetic categories, and capitalism. She was the 2019 recipient of the National Annual Award from Collage Artists of America for her work in assemblage sculpture. She has exhibited her work at museums including Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Torrance Art Museum, and Millard Sheets Art Center as well as in galleries and artist-run spaces nationally. She has taught at CSUN, CSSSA at CalArts, and Pratt Munson in two-dimensional design, painting, exhibition design, and aesthetics. Her work has been published in Forever Magazine. She was an artist-in-residence at Dorland Mountain Arts in Temecula, California, El Sur in CDMX, Mexico, Fish Factory in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, art quarter budapest in Budapest, Hungary, and NEIRO in Prague, Czech Republic.
Adrienne is a Master of Social Work candidate (expected May 2026) committed to collaborative, trauma-informed, harm-reductionist approaches to mental health and recovery. This year, she is completing her MSW coursework, an internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Outpatient Psychiatry, and a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She completed a graduate internship at the Boston University Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and undergraduate internships at McLean Hospital in Geriatric Psychiatry and the Eliot Center at Everett.
In addition to individual clinical work, Adrienne enjoys facilitating arts-based community-based participatory research, community-engaged public art, and arts-based group therapy and therapeutic workshops. Her first arts-based community-based participatory research project, the fish factory, in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, was funded by a McGrath Global and Intercultural Research Grant.
I come to my work in mental health from a place of hope with a firm belief that all people are capable of deep and meaningful change. I work in a relational style. To me, this means I aspire to see people in their fullness, and I care a great deal about forming authentic and trusting relationships with people. I particularly enjoy working with people experiencing co-occurring challenges in mental health and substance use or addiction.