Ellen Handler Spitz

Ellen Handler Spitz writes, teaches, and lectures on the visual, literary, and performing arts and psychology and on the aesthetic lives of children.  Her background includes four years as a research candidate at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.  In 2008, she was the Erikson Scholar at Austen Riggs, .  She has, in addition, held residential fellowships at the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California, the Bunting (Radcliffe) Institute at Harvard University, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation in France, and the Rutgers Center for Children and Childhood Studies.  She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

She is the author of many articles, chapters and books, including Art and Psyche; Image and Insight; Museums of the Mind; Inside Picture Books; The Brightening Glance; Illuminating Childhood, and Freud and Forbidden Knowledge, which she co-edited.  She has reviewed children’s books for The New York Times and The New Republic and contributes regularly to Artcritical: the online magazine of art and ideas.  Her work has been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Serbian. Her most recent research focuses on art as illustration and on children’s aesthetic lives.

Her website is:  www.ellenhandlerspitz.net