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PhD Program
Lee Ann Woolery
Lee Ann Woolery is a fourth year doctoral student in the Environmental Studies Program at Antioch University New England. She has spent her career as an educator, researcher, and practicing artist, focusing on interdisciplinary studies where she blurs the boundaries between art and ecology. She has developed the EcoArt Workshops, art-based perceptual ecology practices that emphasize human reconnection with place-based knowledge through guided exploration in creativity, imagination, and ecology.
She holds a masters degree in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has spent the last seven years working with inner-city youth using art-making as a means of knowing place and as a language for children to frame, contextualize and find meaning from their experience with the natural world.
Her current research interest looks at the origin, nature, and extent of our psychophysiological/aesthetic sensory perceptions and how these abilities play a role in our communication with the natural world. She will investigate art making as a method to access coded mental representations, which are a manifestation of our sensory perceptions, thus enhancing our perceptual abilities of the natural world. Specifically her work will address how the visual image created in the art making process mirrors the mental representation coded from sensory data collected in the body.
She currently holds the position of Arts Coordinator for Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center, a residency program operating from a sustainably designed campus in the northwest, that provides ecologically based educational programming linking science, technology, and the arts. She is part of a team that is developing the PSELC as a laboratory for exploration, providing a forum for critical thinking, teaching and hands-on-exploration.
For the past three years she has lectured at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on ’Cultivating the human-nature bond through Art and Ecology’. In addition she has presented workshops and papers on the integration of art and science. Examples include: Art-based data collection methods for monitoring changes in rainfall and vegetation along riparian ecosystems, Antioch University New England, Sonoran Desert, Mexico; “The White Dress Project”, An action research project exploring art-based discourse applicable to public environmental policymaking supporting clean water, University of Minnesota Duluth Interdisciplinary Conference on The Bonds Between Women and Water; and Addressing Psychological Loss in Adolescent Girls Through EcoArt Therapy, American Art Therapy Association, Portland, Oregon.
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