Lois Holzman is co-founder and director of the East Side Institute, an international research and education centre for social therapeutics and performance activism—two approaches to ensemble creativity for self- and world transformation.

For fifty years she has helped to build, worked with, and supported grassroots organizations working for progressive change and social justice. Lois is both an academic scholar and author of books and articles critical of the medical model of emotional distress and fostering new psychologies, and a popular writer (The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world) blogger at Psychology Today, Mad in America and loisholzman.org, and writer of the unique “advice” column, The Developmentalist.

Creativity is a mundane and extraordinary human activity. It's the making of something new out of what exists. It is a cultural-social activity. I'm primarily interested in the collective activity of creating, that is, how social units create environments in which they qualitatively transform themselves and their environments. A Vygotskian lens is helpful here and I'm happy to share how.

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