Monica Cru-Hall is a creative arts therapist, educator and founder of Kwanzaa Unity Publishing and Therapy North Staffordshire. She is a mother of four and a trusted guide in therapeutic storytelling and community healing. Monica brings a unique combination of lived experience and clinical insight to her work, having navigated homelessness, racial trauma, and neurodivergence. Her offering blends nonviolent communication, creative arts therapy, and decolonised approaches to mental wellness—specifically for Black communities.
She is the author of Made Homeless, Not Hopeless: Surviving Housing Need Burnout and is known for creating thoughtful, honest spaces. Within these spaces, reflection, imagination and lived experience can spark new ways of seeing and making.
“I don’t just believe in healing—I believe in justice through healing. My work is about turning survival into strategy and story into social change.”
Monica is part of Our Time, Our Place, Our Heritage – a major intergenerational project celebrating and safeguarding the city’s endangered industrial ceramic hand-skills. The programme is led by Stoke Creates in partnership with British Ceramics Biennial.