Rebekah Rodriguez-Boerwinkle

You can find more about my work here: https://www.rebekahrodriguezboerwinkle.com/

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Child Study Center, where I work in the Creativity and Emotions Lab at Yale School of Medicine. My research examines how people engage with art and creative experiences, with particular attention to meaning-making, emotion, creativity, empathy, and well-being. I am especially interested in how these experiences unfold across different settings, including museums, galleries, virtual environments, and everyday life.

I earned my PhD in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I studied the psychology of art and creativity, particularly in applied settings, like my open-source virtual gallery tool, OGAR! I also hold a graduate minor in Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation. Aside from art and creativity, academic background also includes training in psychometrics, cognitive science, social and personality psychology, and mixed-methods research. Across my work, I use a wide range of approaches, including field studies, scale development, mobile eye-tracking, movement tracking, virtual-gallery experiments, natural language processing, latent class analysis, structural equation modeling, and qualitative methods.

My research falls into several interconnected areas. First, I study art cognition, including how people perceive, interpret, and construct meaning from works of art. Second, I examine individual differences and behavioral patterns in aesthetic and creative engagement. Third, I develop measures and research tools that make it possible to study complex experiences in naturalistic and digital environments. These interests have led to projects involving museum visitors, artists, children, virtual-gallery users, and international cultural partners.

A central goal of my work is to connect cognitive and psychological theory with real-world arts settings. I have conducted or contributed to research with museums and cultural organizations in the United States and Europe, including the Yale Center for British Art, Riga Art Space, Montclair Art Museum, cARTie, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and several museums in the Pittsburgh region. I am also the co-developer of OGAR, an open-source virtual gallery platform designed for behavioral research, and the Aesthetic Engagement and Reflection Scale, which measures different stages of psychological engagement with art.

My teaching and mentoring are closely connected to my research. I have taught courses on creativity, art, psychology, and statistics, and I am particularly interested in helping students see how psychological science can be used to enrich their lives and communities outside the classroom. I have mentored undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and graduate researchers on projects involving museum studies, scale development, text analysis, qualitative research, and academic writing.

I am also a practicing artist. Although my artistic work is distinct from my research, it gives me a practitioner’s perspective on creative decision-making, interpretation, and the relationship between artists, artworks, and audiences. My experiences as both a researcher and an artist shape the questions I ask, the settings in which I work, and the way I approach teaching, collaboration, and public engagement.