Tally Louise Tripp

Tally Louise Tripp (MA, MSW, LCSW, LICSW, ATR-BC, CTT), an internationally recognized art therapist who brought healing, understanding, and connection to those she taught and mentored around the world, died on December 6, 2023, in Alexandria, VA. The cause of death was cancer.

As one of the first cohorts to graduate from the George Washington University Art Therapy Program, Tally was taught by some of the pioneers in the emerging field of art therapy, including Elinor Ulman, Bernard Levy, Hana Kwiatkowska, and Edith Kramer. She later returned to the program, first as an Adjunct Professor in 1992, and then as a full-time faculty member in 2005, a position she held until she retired in 2021.

Tally was known widely in the art therapy community and among her hundreds of former students as an inspiring, engaged, and much-loved educator. Her work also profoundly impacted her local community through the George Washington University Art Therapy Clinic, a ground-breaking hands-on student training facility opened in 2008 that provided affordable art therapy sessions to local and regional communities in need of these services. As Founding Director of the Clinic, Tally was intimately involved in the creation and organization of the Clinic, and she directly supervised a great number of students who benefited from Tally’s decades of experience working with clients in her thriving private practice.

Tally had a deep and abiding connection to Africa and its people, a love that began with a four-month-long National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) sojourn in Kenya after she graduated from Roanoke College in 1979. However, it was not until 2014 when she began leading groups of her George Washington University students on study abroad courses (teaching them how to adapt art therapy for use by other cultures) at the Bokamoso Youth Foundation in the township of Winterveldt in South Africa (near Pretoria) that she re-engaged with her passion for Africa. Tally’s work there dominated her professional interests for the rest of her life.

Tally’s extensive experience in trauma-informed art therapy and the unique way she blended this with other treatment modalities made her a sought-after presenter at national and international conferences. In addition to graduate degrees in Art Therapy and Clinical Social Work, she was certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP), and she had advanced training in Group Therapy, Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), and other relevant treatment modalities.

After she retired from George Washington University, Tally engaged fully with her international work, particularly through the Common Threads Project, where she was the Director of Training. She also worked with the Global Alliance for Africa Therapeutic Arts Program, and most recently with the Nigerian Internationally Displaced Persons Diaspora Support Group (NIDSG). Her work with these and other international groups frequently took her around the world to Kenya, Tanzania, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Croatia, Nigeria, and Nepal.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tally designed and facilitated a 10-day training program through the Common Threads Project, a New York-based mission focused on providing psychological care to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Common Threads trains local mental health providers on the use of a unique expressive arts methodology (along with other traditional trauma therapy interventions) that gives victims of gendered violence an opportunity to work through their unspeakable trauma by creating a story cloth. Tally’s work in the DRC was done in collaboration with Dr. Denis Mukwege, who is a world-renowned gynecological surgeon, the founder and medical director of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 2018.

Tally’s work with the Common Threads Project also took her to Kathmandu, Nepal in 2022 to offer similar training. Her great love, compassion, and empathy for her Nepalese colleagues was clearly reciprocated through their boundless support of Tally throughout her battle with cancer; she received frequent messages of love, hope, healing, and prayers.

Tally’s adventurous spirit was ever present when she traveled, and she took every opportunity afforded her on her far-flung travels to explore new regions and their people. In Katmandu, Nepal, she hired two guides to take her on a multi-day hike in the foothills of the Himalayas. She became fast friends with her guides, other trekkers, and several local residents she met in tea houses along her route. And although she was forced to hike in monsoon conditions, which brought leeches who occasionally hitched a ride on her ankles, Tally still judged the experience as one of her life’s peak experiences.

Tally returned to Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda many times through her work with the Therapeutic Arts Program of the Global Alliance for Africa. The Chicago-based NGO is associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s graduate art therapy program that was organized to bring groups of volunteer mental health professionals (particularly counselors, dance and drama therapists) to these countries for two weeks each year to enhance the skills of their partner therapeutic artists and counselors.

Her most recent work was with the Nigerian Internationally Displaced Persons Diaspora Support Group (NIDSG). NIDSG provides trauma counselling and support for conflict victims of Boko Haram. These are primarily women, children and families who are displaced and traumatized by kidnapping, rape, and witnessing brutal torture and killings. The group also offers medical clinics for women and children in affected communities. In 2022, Tally worked with her NIDSG colleagues to design training for counselors working with these vulnerable populations of children, traveling to Abuja to work directly with the organization’s staff and trainees.

In Croatia, Tally helped build the country’s first graduate training program of Art Therapy. She also taught intensive therapeutic arts courses in Osijek (eastern Croatia) and was a guest lecturer at the Institute of Mental Health, Ukraine Catholic University, Lviv.

Tally received many awards during her career, including the 2023 International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2017 she was named as an ISSTD Fellow for her outstanding clinical work and teaching regarding dissociation and dissociative disorders. In 2014, she was awarded the Potomac Art Therapy Association Professional Scholarship Award for her excellence in professional scholarship and her commitment to art therapy education, supervision and the promotion of the art therapy field.

Tally was a professional member of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), Potomac Art Therapy Association (PATA), Greater Washington Society of Clinical Social Work (GWSCSW), International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), and the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing International Association (EMDRIA). She also served on the board of the ISSTD and founded the Creative Arts Therapy Special Interest Group (CAT SIG) for that organization.

As many of her friends, colleagues, and family members have said in one way or another, Tally illuminated every room she entered. Her genuine warmth, her sense of childlike wonder, her interest in every moment of life given to her, and the sheer and unfiltered openness with which she approached every experience as an adventure was a way of living that allowed her to fully take in life’s many rich and meaningful experiences with deep appreciation, joy, and connection. This was particularly true when she engaged with the natural world through her backpacking and wilderness experiences.

It was this spirit and her love of the outdoors that took Tally to the top of Mount Kenya during her post-college NOLS adventure in 1979, up the Inca Trail in Peru to Machu Picchu on her second NOLS adventure in 1987, and to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in 2012 for her 57th birthday—a lifelong goal. To see a photograph of Tally taken during any one of these adventures, surrounded by her fellow trekkers and face smeared with sunblock and the grime of the trail, is to see someone truly in harmony with life’s most joyous possibilities. Tally had an innate understanding that every moment of life is precious and as such, worthy of her full attention. And her joyous lust for life was contagious and inspiring to everyone who knew her.

She brought this love of travel and adventure to her family as well. Tally planned many family adventures throughout Europe and the United States, each trip curated for time spent in interesting places that were not necessarily on tourists’ maps. It was a deliberate attempt to facilitate a direct connection with local residents and to mirror for her children (and her husband) the joy that can be found in every instance of unfettered human interaction.

In 2022, she and her husband traveled to the Galapagos, a peak experience where she snorkeled with seals, sea turtles, and other marine life in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean. She joyously walked among the thriving and unafraid wildlife on the islands, including the Blue Footed Boobie, a bird she enthusiastically embraced for its humorous name and its iconic bright blue feet. It is a testament to Tally’s infectious joy, optimism, enthusiasm and magnetic energy that she remained connected to her Galapagos guide, who often reached out to her through social media. Even Tally’s Kilimanjaro guides from her trip over 10 years ago still occasionally messaged her to keep the connection they made alive.

Tally was born at Women’s Hospital in New York City on April 9, 1955, and was adopted at birth by Dr. William Henry Tripp (a young OBGYN resident at the hospital) and his wife Joy Lawless Tripp. The young family later adopted a son, Richard Tripp, and moved to West Hartford, CT. In 2018, Tally reconnected with her birth mother for the first time, and as a result forged a close relationship with her large biological family which she deeply cherished. Tally, her husband, and her adult children were fully embraced by her new-found birth family, and they celebrated last Christmas (2022) together, including her 91-year-old birth mother, who brought tears to the whole family’s eyes with her beautiful piano playing.

Tally attended Renbrook School in West Hartford, CT and the prestigious Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT. She attended Roanoke College in Roanoke, VA (1975 - 1979), a choice she made partially for its proximity to the foothills between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains, which allowed quick access to the region’s many backpacking trails.

She married Mark Morrow, a journalist, editor, and author on June 4, 1988, in West Hartford, CT at the First Baptist Church. It was a date she and her husband revered and celebrated. However, her family’s most cherished tradition was celebrating their first date in 1987, which was a brunch on New Year’s Day at a Georgetown restaurant called Nathan’s.

For nearly 20 years, the family returned to the same Georgetown restaurant on New Year’s Day to celebrate; sitting in the same section, and often the same chairs, and always documenting their loving tradition by asking their waiter to take a picture. After the Georgetown restaurant closed, the tradition continued no matter where the family happened to be: Paris, France, Ponte Vedra, FL, or Richmond, VA.

Tally created a scrapbook for this tradition, and it is a sweet and poignant record of her children’s maturation from infancy to adulthood, as well as she and her husband’s own aging. The final photograph, their 36th anniversary of their first date, was taken in January 2023. In it, Tally is surrounded by her husband, her two children, and her newfound sister and brother-in-law, each holding up fingers to count the 36 years since this beautiful tradition began.

Tally is survived by her husband, Mark Morrow, and two daughters Olivia Tripp Morrow and Camille Louise Tripp Morrow; a brother, Richard Tripp; and her newfound biological family including her mother Janet Maxwell Foster Berne and her siblings Cheryl Ann Mallen, Andrew Keith Berne, and Christopher Russell Berne.

A celebration of her life is planned for the morning of April 13th, 2024 at Trinity United Methodist Church on Cameron Mills Road, Alexandria VA. Details of the ceremony will be posted on Caring Bridge and other social media platforms once arranged.

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in Tally’s memory to one of the organizations to which she gave so much of herself: the Common Threads Project (https://commonthreadsproject.org/); the Nigerian Internationally Displaced Persons Diaspora Support Group (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/nidsg-1191702); or Therapeutic Arts Program of the Global Alliance for Africa (https://www.globalallianceafrica.org/).

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