Ellen Winner

Chair, Psychology, Boston College and senior research associate, Project Zero

Ellen Winner is professor and chair of Psychology at Boston College and a senior research associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in developmental 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 more than 100 articles and three books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and Irony, and Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, which has been translated into eight languages and was awarded the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science. 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.