Dayna Guido, MSW, ACSW, LCSW is a clinical social worker with over 30 years of experience working with children, adolescents, adults and families. She is in private practice in Asheville, NC where she practices individual, family, group and play therapy, as well as providing clinical supervision. Dayna is a Clinical Instructor and serves as a Field Advisor for the School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A lifelong passion for working with at-risk children, adolescents and families began in 1979 when Dayna graduated with a BA from Valparaiso University. Returning to school to earn her MSW from Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984. Dayna was fortunate to be in Chicago at the heart of the family systems movement, enabling her to work and be trained by many of the masters in the field.
Since entering the field over 34 years ago, Dayna has always maintained a clinical and programmatic relationship to at risk youth and their families in an array of jobs and settings. Her positions have included individual and group residential care; individual, group and family therapy; clinical and administrative supervision; nationwide training on a variety of clinical topics such as clinical supervision; ethics; autism spectrum; therapy with adolescents; and play/group therapy.
Expanding on her vast experience of training professionals, in 1997 Dayna began teaching for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work as a Clinical Instructor in the Mountain Area Distance Education MSW Program. Working with TEACCH in the late 1990's, Dayna also added the specialty of Autism Spectrum Disorders to her practice. Dayna also conducted ethics investigations for the North Carolina Social Work Certification and Licensure Board.
Following her dreams to live in the mountains, Dayna moved to Asheville, NC where she continued working with at-risk populations as a Clinical Director and Administrator for residential group homes in the foster care system. During this time Dayna designed the programmatics and successfully operated an adolescent Runaway Shelter for Homeless Youth in the greater Asheville NC area.
After 15 years working for agencies, Dayna decided she could best use her skills as a clinician by going into full-time private practice, specializing in the at-risk population in out-of-home placements. This quickly led to contracts providing clinical supervision to various residential, foster care, and community mental health agencies in Western NC; providing individual and family therapy in inpatient psychiatric hospitals; psychiatric assessments in local hospital Emergency Rooms; family therapy in a partial psychiatric hospital program; and more recently clinical supervision for Trails Carolina.
Dayna's passion in her work draws from her love of life. This expresses itself in her organic gardening; hiking; bookmaking; and mixed media quilting.