New podcast offers real talk for Canadian music therapists
Lee-Anne Dowsett (right) and Michelle Yaciuk (left) bring decades of experience as music therapists and educators to their new podcast, Music Therapy Unplugged: Real Talk for New Professionals.
CMU professors Lee-Anne Dowsett and Michelle Yaciuk know the music therapy world inside and out. On their new podcast, they're pulling back the curtain on what it really takes to work in the field.
The duo launched the first episode of Music Therapy Unplugged: Real Talk for New Professionals on August 4. The subsequent six episodes that make up the first season will be released biweekly on Tuesdays on the podcast's website, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
They're diving into topics like preparing for the certification board exam and job interviews, releasing perfectionism, managing burnout, and busting myths about being a new professional.
Dowsett, Associate Professor of Music Therapy, and Yaciuk, Associate Professor of Education and Music Therapy, started the podcast to support CMU alumni and the broader music therapy community across Canada. They saw a particular gap in Canadian resources addressing the business side of working as a professional music therapist, since many existing resources come from the larger music therapy industry in the United States.
"We found that a lot of our alum were coming back to us, or community members or people even across Canada were reaching out to us, for guidance and mentorship because of our background and specialties," Yaciuk says.
Yaciuk and Dowsett began noticing the same questions coming up again and again.
"We could see there was a huge need for information and resources for new professionals that wasn't getting filled," Dowsett says.
The two faculty members wanted to share their insight in a more coordinated way that could reach more people. In 2022, they decided to turn those conversations into a podcast. They began developing it during sabbaticals and received an internal research grant from CMU to support the project.
They presented about the podcast in 2025 at the Canadian Association of Music Therapy conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
They also kept the operation in the CMU family, hiring recent alumni to write the podcast's theme song and edit the audio, and recording the podcast at the media studio on campus. Everyone employed on the project was a woman or gender-nonconforming person.
"That was also really important to us, that we were supporting young women entrepreneurs in different fields with the grant money that we got," Yaciuk says.
Every episode features conversations between Dowsett and Yaciuk that draw on their expertise and personal experience as practitioners and teachers for the past two decades.
"We have a lot of laughs, even about serious topics, and I think we're also humble enough to laugh at ourselves," Yaciuk says. "We just wanted to allow people to feel like they were part of the conversation."