Ellen Winner is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Boston College and 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 has also co-authored five books: 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). She was the editor of the Arts PROPEL handbooks and PI of the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP). She is currently investigating the impact of Project Zero's many educational frameworks and tools developed since the founding pf Project Zero in 1967.
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.