AMHC in the Media: "The Intimacy Coordinator's Guidebook"

The Intimacy Coordinator's Guidebook: Specialties for Stage and Screen explores the role of the intimacy choreographer with an in-depth look at specializations that exist within the profession.

With contributions by over 30 industry professionals, this book aims to bring awareness to a wide range of needs a project may have and how intimacy professionals use their cultural competency specialists in practice to create the most compelling storytelling. In Part One, the book addresses the scope of practice of an intimacy professional by discussing competency, finding your lens and tangential fields in the industry like fight directors, mental health coordinators and cultural competency specialists. Part Two covers specialties like working with minors, prosthetics, intimacy and disability, staging queer intimacy, working with fat actors, Black American intimacy, dance, working on scenes of trauma, sexual violence and non-consent, and BDSM. Between each chapter is a conversation with an actor, director or producer on their experiences working with an intimacy coordinator. In Part Three, the book looks at what it means to be qualified and intimacy professionals' hopes for the future of the industry.

The chapter "Mental Health Coordination," written by Amanda Edwards with contribution by Bridget McCarthy, introduces the cutting edge work of mental health coordinators for stage and screen. An explanation of why the work is necessary is followed by specific strategies and standards an intimacy professional might want to explore for themselves and their work. A review of liability, scope of practice, and what a mental health coordinator actually does answers specific questions about the job and how it’s both the same and different from intimacy work. This chapter closes with a hopeful look at the future of collaboration between intimacy professionals and mental health coordinators.

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