Lori Ayela Wynters

Lori Ayela Wynters, EdM, MFA,PhD., M.Ed, inspires the complex, rich and multiple stories that we inhabit...or that inhabit us. A first generation New Yorker with lineages from Romania, Morocco, Spain and Hungary, Dr. Wynters draws from her training as a psychologist, liberatory and applied theatre practitioner, pluralistic rabbi, camp director, mama, theologian, musician, dancer and Aikido Backbelt (not necessarily in that order). Her work is informed by having worked directly with Augusto Boal, Jonathan Fox in Playback Theatre, Anna Halprin, Liz Lerman, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Ysaye Barnwell. Her work and reflective practice lives at the intersection of culture, story, the sacred, ethnicity, race, gender, queerness, religion and decolonizing psychologies and spiritualities. Her doctoral dissertation explored ways to create community in higher education through emancipatory theatre practices and the complexity of our intersectional identities. Her MFA culminated in the performance 'T'filah Echad', a choreo-story performance, examining being a Sephardi/Ashkenazi Jew, teaching K-12 educators throughout the United States in a white Christian 'America", culminating in 2 published essays "Embodied Epistemologies' and "Stories From the Inside Out: Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility", in The Arts Education and Social Change, Peter Lang Press.

Lori has served as Faculty in the graduate program at Lesley University, in Integrating the Arts into the K-12 Curriculum and culturally responsive teaching/curriculum and instruction, as Social Psychology Lecturer at Keene State College, Philosophy and Religion Faculty at Franklin Pierce College, Women and Gender Studies and Theatre Faculty at SUNY New Paltz, and currently serves as Educational Leadership Faculty and Campus Chaplain at SUNY New Paltz where she designed and taught the courses, "Women, Performance and Social Change" and "Relational Culture in the Era of Individualism". She serves as Goddard Graduate Institute Faculty in Integrative Health and Social Medicines. In addition, she has served as thesis advisor for the doctoral program at Union Institute and University, worked with Teatro de los Elementos in Cuba, and teaches PBT and other liberatory theatre throughout the southern United States, in Puerto Rico, Europe, Canada and Palestine/Israel. Currently she is writing a book that explores a pedagogy of belonging, relational culture, the sacred, christian hegemony, intersectionalities and story in K-12 and higher education.