Lisa Stephenson is a Senior Lecturer in the school of Education at Leeds Beckett University, leading MA Creativity in Education and teaching across ITE. She is founding director of Story Makers Company a practice-based research collaborative championing creative pedagogies. Lisa specialises in co-participatory action research using arts-based methods with children, artists and teachers. Her research and practice explore the way in which drama and story processes can activate children's holistic learning, dispositions for collective creativity and critical thinking. Lisa has led national and international research projects, integrating creative pedagogies to support children’s socio-emotional communication and conflict resolution. This research has fed into international policy, developing empirical understanding of transferable creative dispositions for proactive wellbeing, impacting nationally on schools. She has led evaluations into applied arts in health and education.