Emily Lapolice is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga Facilitator (TCTSY-F), author, educator, and faculty member at the Center for Trauma and Embodiment at JRI. She has been a psychotherapist for over 20 years, specializing in complex and intergenerational trauma, perinatal mental health, and evidence and culture-based embodiment practices. 

Over the past 2 decades, Emily has worked in New York City and Boston based hospital, school, and other mental health settings with a diverse group of immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized populations impacted by trauma and oppression.  Emily is continually exploring ways to engage individual and collective healing efforts of Self, Body and Land, and to de-colonize the healing experience with the individuals and communities she works with. 

Emily is also the Director of the Solace Healing Arts Program, a Sioux Falls based non-profit that empowers youth in overcoming experiences of trauma through movement and culture-based healing arts, as well a Clinical Research Advisor at the Mind Body Trauma Care Lab out of the University of Minnesota Duluth, studying community-lead research and trauma-sensitive yoga applications with Indigenous and First Nations communities.  Emily serves as a member on the Board of Directors for 2 Indigenous-led non-profits: Project Venture, a program of the National Indian Youth Leadership Project (NIYLP) supporting positive youth development through culturally responsive experiential education; and the Upijata Arts Center, nurturing creativity and artistic expression for the youth of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  

Emily holds Indigenous ancestral lineage with the Mi’kmaq and Huron First Nations Tribes of Eastern Canada, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida.  Although Emily has no personal reference point to the oppression and injustices that many Indigenous Peoples experience, she holds great reverence to the teachings and ways of being that have been gifted to her from Elders and kin, and acknowledges the significant impacts of intergenerational trauma on her own family of origin.  She is committed to furthering our collective understanding of the pervasive impacts of colonization, cultural genocide, and the neocolonial systems and structures that continue today  

Emily is also a mother to two young boys, and lives on the traditional unceded lands of the Pawtucket Tribe of the Massachusett Peoples in what is now known as Arlington, Massachusetts, where she maintains a small private practice.