Virtual Mental Health Mondays Becoming Ourselves through Story, Play, and Performance Across the Lifespan

Creativity is more than self-expression—it is a fundamental part of human development. Join Dr. Thalia Goldstein, Director of the Applied Developmental Psychology program at George Mason University, and Dr. Megan Lewis, Chair of the Department of Theatre at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), for a conversation exploring how storytelling, play, and performance shape identity, foster empathy, strengthen relationships, and support growth across the lifespan. Together, they will share what psychology and theatre can teach us about becoming more connected, resilient, and fully human.

Dr. Thalia Goldstein

Dr. Thalia R. Goldstein is Associate Professor and Director of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA, USA). Her work focuses on children’s developing social and emotional skills, particularly theory of mind, empathy, and emotional control and regulation, and how such skills intersect with children’s engagement in pretend play, theatre, drama, and other imaginative activities. She directs the PLAY Lab (Play, Learning, Arts, and Youth Lab), which conducts research that looks both at the effects of engaging in pretend play and theatre on children’s social-emotional skills, and how children understand and learn social information in fictional worlds.

Dr. Goldstein received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 2010 from Boston College and completed post-doctoral training at Yale University from 2010-2012.

Dr. Goldstein’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The John Templeton Foundation, the Caplan Foundation, Arts Connection, and the Department of Homeland Security. Her papers have appeared in Child Development, Trends in Cognitive Science, Journal of Cognition and Development, and Developmental Science, among others. She is the author of “Why Theatre Education Matters: Understanding its Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Benefits” (Teachers College Press, 2024) and a fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Goldstein serves as an Associate Editor at Child Development,  and on the editorial boards of the journals Empirical Studies in the Arts, Creativity Research Journal, and Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. From 2017-2026 she was co-editor  of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts,  and from 2017-2025, she was the co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, the  Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC).  In 2026 she won the “Research Excellence Award” from the Educational Theatre Association.

Dr. Megan Lewis

Megan Lewis is a South African-American theatre historian and film and performance scholar. She is the author of Performing Whitely in the Postcolony (2016, University of Iowa Press) and Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space (2016, Intellect Books and UNISA Press), which won the Hiddingh-Currie National Book Award in 2018. Lewis has published on African theatre, film, and performance in Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre History Studies, Text & Performance, Theatre Topics, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Dr. Lewis is a multidisciplinary educator with a passion for inspiring intellectual curiosity and advocating for the performing arts as a powerful force for social activation and change. Her teaching passions include South African theatre and film, the politics of performance, non-Western performance traditions, theatres of dissent, and the performance of gender and race.

Lewis’ accolades include a 2015 Distinguished Teacher Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; a national book award in 2018; an intensive summer study abroad program – Arts & Culture in South Africa – focused around the National Arts Festival in Makhanda; and two global teaching voyages for Semester at Sea in 2018 and 2024. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as Full Professor, she was the Director of the Division of Theatre at Colorado State University, earned tenure at UMass Amherst, and was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota.

Lewis believes that with advancement in the academy comes a responsibility to give back through visionary leadership. Megan is a champion of a rich and diverse theatre, an advocate for public education, and is a passionate advocate for the Arts, encouraging the integration of the “A” in “STEM” to make “STEAM.”