Professor of Psychology, Boston College

Senior Research Associate, Harvard Project Zero

Director, Laboratory for Teaching, Learning, and Cognition in the Arts

Ellen Winner

winner@bc.edu

Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1978. Her research focuses on learning and cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children.  She is the author of over 100 articles and four books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (Harvard University Press, 1982); The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (Harvard University Press, 1988); Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (BasicBooks, 1997, translated into six languages and winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science); and Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Teachers College Press, 2007, co-authored with Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, and Kimberly Sheridan).

She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from the American Psychological Association. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10, Psychology and the Arts) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. She is currently studying the cognitive and social skills learned from experience in the visual arts and theater, cognitive and perceptual strategies underlying talent in drawing, and the effects of music training on children’s brain and cognitive development.