Arts & Dreams is a New York City based organization providing two-hour empowering art workshops for children, teens and adults.
Our mission is to expand hope and self-love through creative expression.
Since 2009, Arts & Dreams has been carrying out its mission by sharing empowering art workshops with hundreds of people throughout New York and New Jersey.
Arts & Dreams helps change the way we think
and feel about ourselves through:
and feel about ourselves through:
Creativity
Meditation
Mirror work
and Positive affirmations
Meditation
Mirror work
and Positive affirmations
Arts & Dreams Co-Founders/Workshop Leaders
Arts & Dreams was co-founded by friends Laura Baran and Patricia Geremia while working together in a Wall Street office where they discovered a mutual love of art, spirituality, education, mental health and the desire to help people thrive.
Arts & Dreams was co-founded by friends Laura Baran and Patricia Geremia while working together in a Wall Street office where they discovered a mutual love of art, spirituality, education, mental health and the desire to help people thrive.
Laura Baran is an award-winning professional artist. She received her BFA with honors from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Laura served on the Board of Directors for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's NYC Chapter 2012-13.
Patricia Geremia is the owner of PatriciaG Photos, her own line of photo greeting cards and prints. She is a certified professional Reiki healer. Patricia has served as a youth mentor in NYC since 1995.
Our Story
Laura Baran: Arts & Dreams is an antidote to hopelessness. We make art that encourages us to feel enthusiastic about our worthiness of dreaming big. I share my personal experience with depression and what it was like to lose my 20-year-old brother Jeff in 2000. In his suicide note, Jeff wrote it wasn’t the depression that he couldn't take, it was the hopelessness. My life's mission is to empower people to build ourselves up using art and self-love, and to expand the sense of hopefullness that can prevent suicide.
Patricia Geremia: When we worked together on Wall Street, while reading Louise Hay's 'You Can Heal Your Life' just for fun, Laura and I began wondering what life would be like if we had learned tools for self-love as children. Why don’t we learn how to love ourselves in school along with the basics? How different would our lives be if we did? Laura found solace and release through her painting - she was using affirmations – positive statements – in her art. She had the idea of asking children to think of an affirmation that resonated with them and then paint it, feel it, have fun with it, and take it home to inspire them. We want to create that hopeful spark in a child’s life by teaching them it is okay to love themselves, in fact it is necessary! And give them some tools to do it. Louise Hay tells us to look in the mirror and say 'I love you. I really, really love you.' I thought we’d emulate that with a unique, silver hand-mirror that someone gave me as a gift many years ago.
Laura: The act of creating art is healing. I believe every person has the creative ability to make art. Sometimes as we get older we come to think that we aren’t creative. When we’re little, we all want to have fun and exciting lives. We’re all artists and we’re all dreamers. Arts & Dreams was born.
As we grow Arts & Dreams, we are gratefully accepting donations through our Donation Page to provide free workshops in schools and community centers without budgets for these types of events. Arts & Dreams is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a charitable organization, and donations are eligible for tax deductions.
