The Village She Went Looking For
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Root to Bloom
How Dr. Kim Palmiotto blended art, therapy, and a lot of lived experience into Root to Bloom, a West Annapolis studio where girls, women, and mothers can simply be themselves.
Kim Palmiotto did not set out to build a business so much as to answer something she kept feeling in her own life. She needed a village. “I need a village, and I don’t feel like the village is there anymore. I want people to find each other,” she says. Root to Bloom, her studio on Ridgely Avenue in Annapolis, is her answer to that: a place where girls, women, and mothers can connect, create, and simply be themselves.
A side hustle she loved most
For 25 years, Kim worked in schools as a school psychologist, a role centered on evaluations, behavior, and helping students qualify for support. Alongside it, she ran an independent therapy practice for roughly two decades, almost as a side hustle, because the individual growth she got to witness there was the part she loved most. She is also, by training, an art therapist. When the idea of combining those two passions for the community sparked in her head, she went for it.
Root to Bloom has evolved since then. What began as social-emotional education infused with art and expression has grown into something closer to a therapeutic studio. Today Kim offers individual therapy, workshops, and classes along what she describes as a continuum: a purely-for-fun, craft-based summer camp at one end, a semester-long group supporting girls through the leap into middle school at the other, and, for mothers raising neurodivergent children, a group that is not about parenting but about the mothers themselves. Her classes and workshops focus on girls nine and up, with a particular sweet spot between nine and twelve.
Starting where you are
Kim leads with creativity, on purpose. “I will always lead with creativity because creativity is what taps into our inner selves that we ignore a lot of the time,” she says. Sometimes that means art, sometimes writing, sometimes simply looking at things from a different angle. Instead of opening with a theoretical framework, she starts somewhere more human: let’s start where you are, figure out what you need, and work from there.
That approach tends to reveal layers. A parent might bring in a daughter for anxiety, and often what surfaces is a family dynamic or a generational pattern worth unpacking together. Awareness, she says, is where it starts. And what makes her different is that she is not a therapist who teaches from a distance. She is living much of it right alongside her clients, raising four girls of her own.
“Let’s share in this together because I get it.”
The myth she’d love to retire
If Kim could clear up one misconception about her field, it is the quiet assumption that therapy is a sign of weakness, that needing it means something is wrong with you. What she finds, over and over, is the opposite. As she puts it, “Most of us will benefit from some kind of therapeutic intervention because every single one of us is carrying some kind of generational pattern that doesn’t work for us.” Become aware of those patterns, and each generation can shift, even a little. She also knows that shame and guilt keep many people from ever walking through the door. Her message to them is simple.
“Please don’t let that stop you, because if you find the correct person that you vibe with, it’s literally game changing in your life.”
Building the village (and a couple of surprises)
It comes back, again, to the village. “I want my community to feel connected,” she says. Too many of us are living in silos, she notes, a group here, an online thread there, when what we really need is to be in the same room, supporting one another.
A couple of things tend to surprise people who only know her professionally. The first is that she is a serious artist: she was once accepted into a master’s program at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Though she chose not to complete the program, the passion never left. “I still carried that passion for art my entire life, and I do it all the time,” she says. “I just do it kind of on the down low,” something she is now, slowly and happily, bringing back into her work. The second surprise, she admits with a laugh, is that she curses a lot.
It all comes back to the same idea: becoming aware of the patterns we carry, shifting each generation just a little, and doing it together instead of alone. That, more than any single class or session, is what Root to Bloom is for.
Find Root to Bloom
Dr. Kim Palmiotto, Founder, art therapist, clinical counselor & school psychologist
619 Ridgely Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401
By appointment only
