Amy Lauren Oestreicher

Survivor advocate, PTSD specialist, actress, multidisciplinary teaching artist, Huffington Post columnist and global speaker

Amy Oestreicher is an Audie Award-nominated PTSD specialist, artist, author, speaker for TEDx and RAINN, award-winning actress, and playwright.

As a survivor and “thriver” of multiple traumas, Amy eagerly shares the gifts of life’s “beautiful detours” in her educational programming, writing, mixed media art, performance and inspirational speaking. Amy has toured her autobiographical musical, Gutless & Grateful, to over 200 venues from 54 Below to Barrington Stage Company since its 2012 NYC debut, as well as a mental health and sexual assault education program for colleges, conferences and organizations.  

She’s an in-demand keynote speaker for top organizations – including Pacific Rim International Disability Conference, International School of Social Work Conference, and the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress – as well as a valued speaker at numerous conferences and college campuses, discussing topics relating to mental health, sexual abuse, resilience, PTSD and women’s issues.

Combining sexual assault prevention with PTSD education, Amy illustrates the imperative value breaking silence.  Participants will understand how compounded trauma affects survivors and how, through re-experiencing feeling, the "freeze" response is unthawed, allowing them to move through trauma.

By gaining a better appreciation of the repercussions of sexual assault and learning personal empowerment, students who experience sexual violence are better able to respond with resilience.

Through facilitating a discussion on psychological consequences of sexual violence, Amy provides tools to help survivors deal with the complex feelings, and effective coping skills to empower those needing understanding.  

As the 2014 Recipient of Convatec’s Great Comebacks Award and WEGO Health  “Health Activist Hero”,  for National WOCN conferences and the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress, and writing for the official print publication of the UOAA.  

She has devised programming for the Transformative Language Arts Network National Conference, the Eating Recovery Foundation, the 40th Anniversary New England Educational Opportunity Association Milestones Conference, three Annual National Mental Health America Conference, and others. She has been the featured keynote speaker for national conferences including the Pacific Rim Conference of Diversity and Disability, the International School of Social Work Conference, and Women of Resilience.

As a playwright, Amy has received awards and accolades for engaging her audiences in dynamic conversation on trauma’s effects on society, including Women Around Town’s “Women to Celebrate” 2014, BroadwayWorld “Best Theatre Debut,”  Bistro Awards “New York Top Pick, and the “Singular Award” at the Sarasolo Theatre Festival.Amy has performed excerpts of her solo oral history play, Fibers, as part of Brooklyn's immigrants and Exile, Beechwood Art's Giving Voice, Dixon Place, Seekonk Storytelling Television Special, and Museum of Jewish Heritage Festival of Untold Women.

She is a cabaret and theatre reviewer for BroadwayWorld, Her theatre education essays and monologues have been published in Creative Pedagogy journals, as part of a theatre curriculum for high school students in the Philippines.. Her short plays have been published by the Eddy Theatre Company and finalists in Manhattan Repertory Theatre’s Short Play Festival, as well as NYC Playwright’s Women in the Age of Trump.

Amy’s collaboration with Beechwood Arts on the immersion salon, “Resilience and the Power of the Human Spirit”, has traveled around the world to health and arts facilities as a public installation, incorporating her monologues, art, writing and recipes to express the life-altering detours and ultimately the invaluable gifts of her resilient journey.  She has recently published her memoir, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful.

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