Meet Your PZers
Ellen Winner
She/Her
Senior Research Associate
ellen.winner@bc.edu
Ellen has been a Project Zero researcher since 1973. A cognitive developmental psychologist, she was a professor and chair of psychology at Boston College where she directed the Arts and Mind Lab. She has a strong interest in the arts from both a psychological and educational perspective.
PZ Work
Ellen has been involved in a number of research projects at PZ on the arts: Arts PROPEL, Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP), and Studio Thinking. She recently authored an in-depth study of the history and impact of PZ’s educational frameworks: Project Zero and Its Impact. You can read more about her research and publications at ellenwinner.com.
Official Biography for Media
Ellen Winner is a professor emerita of Psychology at Boston College and a senior research associate at Project Zero. She has authored five books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (1982), The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (1988), Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (1996), How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration (2019), and An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education from Colonial Times to a Promising Future (2022). And co-authored five more: Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (2007), Studio Thinking 2 (2013), Studio Thinking 3 (2022), Studio Thinking from the Start: The K-8 Art Educator's Handbook (2018), and The Child as Visual Artist (2022).
Winner was the editor of the Arts PROPEL handbooks and PI of the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP). She has served as president of APA's Division 10, Psychology and the Arts in 1995-1996, and received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10 in 2000. She is a fellow of APA Division 10 and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.
Ellen's Projects and Publications
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