Lois Holzman is the director and co-founder of the East Side Institute, a New York City-based international research and training center for new approaches to human development and community. As a leading proponent of a cultural approach to human learning and development, she has made the writings of Lev Vygotsky relevant to the fields of psychotherapy, education and organizational development. She is well known for her pioneering work in exploring the human capacity to perform and its fundamentality in learning how to learn.
Holzman has helped to develop social therapy, the non-psychological approach to human development and learning created by Fred Newman. As Newman’s chief collaborator for over a quarter of a century, she is the leading expert on his work. She has been involved in the development of social therapeutic methodology, not only in psychotherapeutic practice, but also in the contributions it has made to education across the life span, youth development, medicine and healthcare, and organizational development and executive leadership. As an author, lecturer and trainer, she is in the thick of debates among postmodernists, activity theorists, critical psychologists and other philosophically and politically informed scholars on how to transform psychology into a radically humane and empowering practice.
Holzman has contributed to the development of the youth programs of the All Stars Project, Inc. from its earliest days, as a volunteer, pro bono consultant, researcher and bridge to the academic community. In addition to writing and speaking about the All Stars’ supplemental education/youth development programs, in 1993 she brought All Stars young people to Moscow to present at an international conference on Vygotsky, and in 2002 produced “Young People Learn by Studying Themselves: The All Stars Talent Show in Action,” a documentary video starring youth from the All Stars.
Holzman has written or edited nine books and over sixty articles on human development and learning, psychology, education and social therapy; among them: Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind; Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models; Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist (with Fred Newman); and Psychological Investigations: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy (with Rafael Mendez). Her latest is Vygotsky at Work and Play (Routledge, 2009).
Holzman is convener of the Performing the World conference, which, since its inception in 2001, has brought together more than 1,500 researchers and practitioners from 40 countries using the latest discoveries about performance and human growth to creatively address the social, economic and cultural problems faced by their communities. In addition, she has initiated collaborative cultural / psychological / community-building projects among psychologists, social workers and educators from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Sweden and other countries. She is particularly respected as an activist scholar who builds bridges between university-based and community-based practices, bringing the traditions and innovations of each to the other.
Before earning her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University in 1977, Holzman did graduate work in linguistics at Brown and Columbia Universities. As a postgraduate research fellow at Michael Cole’s Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at Rockefeller University, she contributed to pioneering work on everyday cognition and the possibility of an ecologically valid psychology. She then joined the faculty of Empire State College, SUNY, where she taught for over a decade in the areas of human development, educational studies and community services. Her diverse career also includes serving as director of the Barbara Taylor School, a Vygotskian-based elementary school, which for twelve years was a living laboratory for the practice of developmental learning.
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