About Svetlana
Svetlana O. Coalson, MA, MSc (Psychotherapy), was educated at St. Petersburg State Academy of Culture (Russia), Cornell University (USA), and University of Sheffield (UK). She opened her private practice in Prague in 2008.
She was born in 1964 in St.Petersburg. She left Russia to attend a postgraduate program in literature at Cornell University. Before training as a qualified psychotherapist she taught languages, literature and communication courses at Cornell and other programs, worked as a researcher, producer and a freelance journalist. In 1992 she returned to Russia to work as a manager of the Moscow Bureau of Newsweek.
Her work in Russia in the early and mid 1990's regularly put her in contact with people in challenging, highly stressful, often critical situations. This guided her deepening interest in clinical psychology and mental health, with an emphasis on coping and resilience, and eventually led to a shift in her career as she pursued professional education and training in psychotherapy. From 2018 to 2021 she was teaching couples therapy at University of NY in Prague MA Psychology program and supervising trainees at UNYP counselling center.
Svetlana has lived and worked in the USA, Russia, France, and in the Czech Republic, where she now holds permanent residency. Her broad intercultural background provided her with an in-depth knowledge and appreciation of cultural diversity, but also with a first-hand experience of the difficulties and frustrations associated with being an expatriate. She has a multicultural family and a bilingual daughter.
