Kendra Knudsen is the Founding Director of the Creative Minds Project (CMP), which delivers social-emotional creative arts groups for mind-body wellness and healing in the community.  The CMP is a partnership between UCLArts and Healing and the Creative Minds student group at UCLA, of which Kendra was the founding director. Kendra currently coordinates the John F. Templeton Foundation-founded research study, The Big C Project: Exploring the Brain Bases of Exceptional Creativity.  Kendra graduated with honors from UCLA with a B.S. in Psychobiology and a minor in Disability Studies. Within the CMP, Kendra trained in UCLArts and Healing’s evidence-based Beat the Odds: Social-Emotional Development through the Framework of Drumming and worked with UCLArts and Healing consultants to adapt its curriculum for adults experiencing homelessness and chronic mental illness.  Kendra has also assisted with a diversity of therapeutic expressive arts groups within the CMP as well as the UCLArts and Healing Social Emotional Arts (SEA) Certificate Program.  While studying at UCLA, Kendra trained as a research coordinator for the UCLA300: Biology of Creativity Project  within the Tennenbaum Family Center for the Biology of Creativity (TFCBC), where she worked with Drs. Robert Bilder and Peter Bentler to examine the factor structure of lifetime creative achievement in preparation for her current analysis of intelligence, personality and cognitive flexibility in causal models of creative achievement.  Kendra recently co-developed a theory with Dr. Bilder on the importance of “on the edge of chaos” cognitive states in creativity for the Frontiers in Neuroscience special edition in psychopathology.  She is first author for a chapter reviewing the TFCBC’s basic biological research in animal creativity and cognition as part of Drs. Alison and James Kaufman’s textbook on Animal Invention and Creativity (in press).  Kendra is the 2013 Chancellor’s Service Award Recipient, 2012 UCLA Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award Recipient, the 2012 Donald A. Strauss Foundation Scholar, 2011-2012 Undergraduate Research Scholar, and the 2010-2011 Honor's Milton Gottlieb Foundation Scholar. 

 

 

Rathi Ramasamy is the Student Committee Director of the Creative Minds Project. Rathi is a Masters of Public Health student in the department of Health Policy and Management at UCLA. She has an undergraduate background in creative writing, and through her involvement with the Creative Minds Project, she is able to explore the healing potential of the arts and combine her passion for the arts with her passion for health and wellness.  

 

 

Ping Ho  is the Founding Director of UCLArts and Healing, which facilitates the use of the arts for mind-body wellness and healing in the community as a vehicle for empowerment and transformation. UCLArts and Healing is an organizational member of the UCLA Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine, of which Ping is a Steering Committee Member and was the founding administrator. She was also the founding administrator for the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), which led to the privilege of writing for Norman Cousins and co-writing the professional autobiography of George F. Solomon, M.D., founder of the field of PNI. In addition, Ping has an extensive background as a health educator and performing artist. She has a BA in psychology with honors from Stanford University, an MA in counseling psychology with specialization in exercise physiology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MPH in Community Health Sciences from UCLA School of Public Health. Ping is on the Council of Advisors for the Academic Consortium for Complementary and Alternative Health Care, a national network of educational organizations and agencies in complementary and alternative medicine. She is also a member of a subcommittee for professional learning for CREATE CA, a California Arts Council-initiated collaborative to educate administrators in education regarding the value of the arts for learning and behavior, what constitutes quality arts education, and models for successful implementation and outcomes. She is a co-developer of the program, Beat the Odds: Social and Emotional Skill Building Delivered in a Framework of Drumming, and was the principal investigator of its effectiveness study that was published in the journal,Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.