About

SARAH DOHRMANN, MFA, LMSW, is a psychotherapist, a literary nonfiction writer, and a teacher of writing.

She is currently a psychotherapist at Brooklyn Somatic Therapy where she integrates somatic approaches and a warm, relational style to invite clients in exploring and discovering what stories they unconsciously hold. She’s a Level 4 Clinical Fellowship trainee at the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy (GAP) and an EMDRIA-trained EMDR practitioner treating individuals who have experienced complex and/or acute traumas. In addition to working with individuals at Brooklyn Somatic Therapy and in GAP’s low-fee clinic, Sarah has also worked with survivors of interpersonal and gender-based violence in the Domestic Violence Aftercare Program at University Settlement in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as well as with LGBTQIA+ young adults living in shelter, mothers who have transitioned out of foster care and are at risk of losing their own children to care, and terminally ill children and their caregivers. Sarah graduated with honors from the Silberman School of Social Work at CUNY–Hunter College.

Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House Magazine, The Iowa Review, New York, Bustle, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Observer, among others. A former Fulbright grantee (Morocco), Sarah has also received a number of writing grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Workspace), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (Scholar), the Aspen Writers’ Foundation (Aspen Words), and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize), among others. Sarah received her MFA from the Graduate Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Sarah has served as a part-time professor of writing in Liberal Studies at New York University since 2016; in 2024 she was awarded the Liberal Studies Excellence in Teaching Award. She has also taught writing in the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College, the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and as a longtime writer-in-residence with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, where she is now a member of the Board of Directors.

Sarah’s students, including those who’ve taken her DIVING INTO THE WRECK personal nonfiction writing workshops, have published their work widely, including in such journals and publications as The New York Times, The Sun, and Longreads, among others. Former DIVING INTO THE WRECK students have also published their writing in book form, including the award-winning memoirs What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo and The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin by Hafizah Geter.