Shoshi Keisari

PhD, Associate Professor at the School of Creative Arts Therapies, University of Haifa (IS)

Shoshi Keisari, Ph.D Associate Professor at the University of Haifa, directs the Drama Therapy and Psychodrama Graduate Program. She is also a researcher with the Center for Research and Study of Aging, the Emili Sagol Creative Arts Therapies Research Center, and the Drama and Health Science Lab at the University of Haifa. Her research investigates playfulness and its neural mechanisms, drama therapy across the lifespan, playback theatre, and arts-based approaches for aging. She is the co-author of the book An Introduction to Psychotherapeutic Playback Theater: Hall of Mirrors on Stage, published by Routledge. She has presented her work at international conferences and published in international refereed journals. Her studies are supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation NSF–BSF.

TALK: Playful brains: Exploring the cognitive and neurophysiological processes of improvisation in aging

Dwaynica Greaves

PhD, Neuroscientist, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UK)

Dwaynica Greaves is a Neuroscientist, Neuroaesthetician and Creative from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. She has spent the last six years researching at the intersection of Theatre and Social-Cognitive Neuroscience, to investigate the effects of building and performing a character on an actor’s sense of self.  

TALK: Capturing the Actor-character distance: a qualitative investigation 

In this talk, I will discuss the qualitative component of a mixed-methods questionnaire, The Bloomsbury Actor’s Questionnaire (BAQ; Greaves et al., under review) currently in development for Theatre-Neuroscience research. One of the aims of the BAQ was to capture and measure the factors that contribute to the perceived distance an actor experiences between themselves and their character across embodied dimensions. These qualitative insights offered a lens for exploring actors’ experiences of becoming, doubleness, and distance in relation to their characters. Actors’ responses continue to deepen our understanding of what it means to embody a character, drawing on the expertise and lived experiences of the actors themselves.

Victoria Leong

PhD, Professor, Founding Director of the Early Mental Potential and Wellbeing Research (EMPOWER) Centre; Associate Dean, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Victoria Leong is Full Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Founding Director of the Early Mental Potential and Wellbeing Research (EMPOWER) Centre, Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition and Associate Dean (Outreach and Partnerships) of the Graduate College at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also Affiliated A/Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research examines the neural basis of the parent-offspring “social interactome”, across human and rodent species, in both healthy and disease models. She is a pioneer in the use of dyadic-EEG and in the development of culture-fair dyadic sociometric predictive models of infant cognition and developing executive function. This research has been translated into early precision screening tools and personalised interventions (patent-pending), now being trialled in real-world contexts. Her work has received recognition through the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, Robert J. Glushko Prize and the Nanyang Research Award. She previously held the Sutasoma Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (UK), followed by the Parke Davis Fellowship at Harvard University (US). Through her research labs based in Cambridge University and Singapore, she has mentored over 100 early career researchers and research students. Her team is culturally diverse, with researchers hailing from 16 different countries. She has built strategic partnerships across US, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa through international collaborative research programmes worth over SGD$50M (USD$35M), holding over SGD$20M (USD$15M) as Principal Investigator.

TALK: Understanding early human development through the parent-child interactome

During early sensitive periods, healthy neurodevelopment depends on warm, contingent communication and social engagement between infants and caregivers. The timing and pattern of these interactions is crucial. Optimally, caregivers provide rich multisensory experiences through responsive and predictable temporal sequences to regulate infant attention and emotion. This creates stable coupled biobehavioural states between parent and child, such as joint attention and emotional synchrony, which potentiate communication and social knowledge transmission between adult and child. This multisensory interface can be described as the parent-child interactome, which provides a systems level description of the parent and child’s joint neurophysiological and sensorimotor state space, created through interaction. In this talk, examples will be provided from both human and animal optogenetic models to illustrate the neural attractor states that arise from dynamics within the parent-offspring interactome. Moving from theory to real-world application, dyadic sociometrics is introduced asa technique for real-time multi-modality AI-based analysis of the parent-child interactome (patent pending). For infants as young as 12 months of age, the parent-child interactome predicts emerging language, socioemotional and cognitive skills with up to 96% accuracy across UK, Singapore and Brazil cohorts. This scalable technology is now being trialled by early intervention service providers in Singapore as a culture-fair deep phenotyping tool for early developmental profiling. The future potential for interactome-based techniques to advance current understanding of neurodevelopment and sensitive periods, and to be used in early risk identification and personalised therapeutics is discussed.

Marcel Foster

MPH, CEO and Co-Founder of Performance Hypothesis and a Doctoral Researcher (DPhil, PRS) in Translational Health Sciences at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences

Marcel W. Foster, MPH (they/them) is the CEO and Co-Founder of Performance Hypothesis and a Doctoral Researcher (DPhil, PRS) in Translational Health Sciences at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences.

Beginning their career in behavioral observation at the Jane Goodall Institute—where they co-authored early research in the American Journal of Primatology (2008), Foster has dedicated nearly two decades to understanding human interaction, group cohesion, and the systemic evaluation of complex health interventions. They hold a Master of Public Health from Emory University and serve as affiliate faculty at the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine.

At Performance Hypothesis, Foster directs strategy and policy evaluation for major healthcare systems,cultural institutions, and global health partners—including NYC Health + Hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center. Under their executive leadership, Performance Hypothesis spearheaded the research and advocacy initiatives that resulted in the passage of Georgia’s historic House Resolution 1007, the first dedicated arts and mental health legislative resolution in the United States.

Their doctoral research at Oxford builds directly on these achievements, examining how state bureaucracies,health systems, and policy architects operationalize, finance, and sustain creative health infrastructure globally.

TALK: From Observation to Systemic Impact: A Personal Journey Through Human Interaction, Performative Neuroscience, and Health Polic

Long before mapping global health policies or evaluating creative health interventions, my path began with a fundamental practice: close observation. Early in my career, my work at the Jane Goodall Institute, which included co-authoring observational behavioral research in the American Journal of Primatology (Foster et al., 2008), taught me how deeply non-verbal communication, group cohesion, and social bonding are rooted in our shared nature. While that time at the Institute was about observing foundational social dynamics rather than studying arts or health, it instilled a lasting perspective on how we attune to human interaction and embodied practice.

Decades later, that same lens of careful observation informs how we evaluate creative health practice at the intersection of neuroscience and public policy. Modern social neuroscience has illuminated how role-play, embodiment, and creative performance modulate bio-behavioral responses, oxytocin levels, and affective regulation. Yet a critical translation gap remains between these micro-level neuro-performance insights and the macro-level health systems required to sustain them.

This keynote reflects on that arc, from learning to observe raw social interaction at the Jane Goodall Institute to building evaluation frameworks for complex health systems. We explore how researchers, performance practitioners, and policy architects can bridge the gap between creative spaces and clinical infrastructure, translating the nuanced human experience of performative arts into actionable, evidence-based health policy.

Yulia Golland

PhD, Principal Investigator of the Social Physiology Lab at Reichman University (IS)

Yulia Golland is the Principal Investigator of the Social Physiology Lab at Reichman University, jointly based at the Dina Recanati School of Medicine and the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology. Broadly, her research examines how physiological systems of arousal and regulation operate in real-life social contexts, with the long-term goal of identifying mechanisms that enable people to adapt and thrive under challenge and uncertainty.

Her work combines multimodal physiological and behavioral measures with ecologically grounded paradigms, field experiments, and rigorous quantitative approaches. Her research has made substantial contributions to the study of interpersonal synchrony and compassion, and more recently to the mechanisms and effects of playful interactions across the lifespan. While rooted in basic social neuroscience, her research is increasingly extending into clinical domains, such as psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, with the aim of translating mechanistic insights into meaningful outcomes for health and well-being.

TALK: Playful and Alert: the role of optimal positive arousal in playful interactions

NEPA

Nepa anophthalma is a small, blind water scorpion endemic to Movile Cave, Romania, living in an environment devoid of light and oxygen. The discovery of this remarkable creature was inspired by the work of Emil Racoviță, the pioneering Romanian biologist who studied how life evolves in isolated cave ecosystems. Similarly, the NEPA initiative views the performing arts as a living laboratory for studying the complexity of human communication, emotion, and representation of life, bringing neuroscientific and physiological research methods from the lab into the performative space.

Check out the previous edition of the NEPA SEMINAR (2025)