I’m Isabel, a learning scientist, artist, and creativity coach dedicated to helping people rediscover their creative potential.
HERE IS MY STORY...
Creativity has always been my calling. It’s what people have sought me out for since childhood—“Isa! Can you draw my dog?”— and it’s what I’ve devoted my life to: studying, practicing and guiding others on their creative path.
I'm also VERY curious. I earned a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University, where I studied the science of how people make things, driven purely by curiosity. My research draws from embodied cognition, creative psychology, and philosophy to explore not just how creativity works but how we can nurture it and live more creatively.
But creativity isn’t just my field of study; it’s my personal journey. Like many, I once set aside my artistic dreams, only to become, ironically, a scholar who studied creativity!
Living in New York, I longed to create but felt paralyzed. I researched how people make things but hesitated to make anything myself. I studied the body’s role in creativity yet felt disconnected from my own.
My body had been sending urgent signals—ones I ignored until I needed heart surgery. Seeing my heart on a screen for the first time, beating like a wild animal, desperate to get my attention, changed everything.
Moving to Costa Rica, I applied what I had studied to my own life, and slowly, creativity began to flow again. I reconnected with my body, learned to listen to my intuition, and finally felt the truth of what I had studied: we are all part of a vast, unfolding creative universe, waiting for us to join.
Now, through The Creative Nest, I integrate science and spirituality to help others release creative blocks. I’ve seen how stress, anxiety, and numbness often stem from creative deprivation—and how simple practices can restore our creative vitality.
I also empower organizations to cultivate a culture of creativity that not only drives innovation but also creates a meaningful environment where people feel inspired, thrive, and do their best work.
Personally, I practice the art of living a creative life, mindfully weaving new possibilities into my day-to-day in Costa Rica, where I live with my husband, two children, a dog named Kodak, and countless other creatures.
Bringing creativity back to your life and work changes everything! The desire to create is one of our deepest yearnings and in fulfilling it, we become part of a wider, ever-unfolding creative ecology.
I’m deeply grateful to have you here and I can’t wait to create something new with you!
Dr. Isabel Correa Grez
The Creativity Letters:
More than just a newsletter—these are letters from me to you, filled with inspiration on living a creative life and all the resources I’m constantly creating for you.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals and Conference Proceedings
2024
Correa, I. (2024). Interspecies creativity: A life-centered framework for maker education [Doctoral dissertation]. Teachers College, Columbia University.
2023
Correa, I., & Holbert, N., (2023) Material-led research: A Posthumanist methodology for maker education practitioners. Digital Culture & Education, 14(5), 191-213
Correa, I., Holbert, N., Danzig, B., VonJoo, L. (2023). Dialogues without words: Multispecies and multimattered creativity in maker education. Proceedings of International Conference of Learning Science (ICLS 2023). Montreal, Canada.
Tissenbaum, M., Smith, C., Bawankule, A., Hopping, D., Holbert, N., Correa, I., Danzig, B., & Zikovitz D., (2023). Connected Spaces: Technological Infrastructure for Collaborative Debugging at a Distance. In L. Morales-Navarro & J. B. Kafai, Designing for Successful Failure: Constructionist Perspectives on Supporting Personally Meaningful and Culturally Empowered Learning and Teaching [Symposium]. Proceedings of Constructionism 2023. New York, US
Holbert, N., Dando, M., Correa, I. (2023). Critical Constructionist Design: A design framework and analytic tool for developing and documenting speculative learning experiences. In M. Mirra & A. Garcia (Eds.), Speculative Pedagogies: Designing Equitable Educational Futures. New York, TC Press.
2022
Zikovitz, D., Holbert, N., & Correa, I. (2022). The Secret Communication Panel: A Constructionist Communications Device for Developing Computational Thinking Skills in School-Age Children. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’22), June 27–30, 2022, Braga, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3501712.3535277
2021
Correa, I., Holbert, N. (2021). Myco-kit: Towards a design for interspecies creative learning. Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC 2021). Athens, Greece [online]. (PDF)
Correa, I. (2021). Human-Nature Entanglements: Explorations in Creativity Beyond Human [Exhibition]. The Offit Gallery, New York City, NY. https://library.tc.columbia.edu/news/1976
2020
Holbert, N., Dando, M., Correa, I. (2020). Afrofuturism as critical constructionist design: Building futures from the past and present. Learning Media and Technology. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1754237
Correa, I., Holbert, N. (2020). Creating Purpose: A Case Study of the Creative Process of an African American Teen in Constructionist Making. Proceedings of International Conference of Learning Science (ICLS 2020). Nashville, TN. (PDF)
Holbert, N., Dando, M. & Correa, I. (2020). Playing with FuturePasts: Afrofuturist Design as Critical Praxis. In N. Holbert (Chair) & H. Yoon (Chair), and L. Vasudevan (Discussant), The Aesthetics of (Un)Charted Play: Negotiating Nostalgia and Digital Demons in an Era of "Post-Truth" Educational Research. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2020). Nashville, TN: International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Correa, I. (2020). Human-Nature Meaning-Making. Mothers and daughters rethinking humans’ relationship with nature through critical constructionist design. Proceedings of FABLEARN 2020. New York, NY.
Correa, I. & Holbert, N. (2020). The human-Nature project: Using critical constructionist design to re-think humans’ relationship with nature. Proceedings of Constructionism 2020. Dublin, Ireland.
2019
Dando M.B., Holbert N., Correa I. (2019). Remixing Wakanda: Envisioning Critical Afrofuturist Design Pedagogies. Proceedings of FABLEARN 2019. New York, NY. (PDF)
Correa, I. (2019, December). The HumaNature Project: Mothers and Daughters Re-thinking Humans’ Relationship with Nature through Critical Constructionist Design. Paper presented at the Qualitative Research Methods Course Conference, Teachers College, Columbia University. New York, NY.
Correa, I. (2018). WeKnow, an online community for tweens as a social system for creativity. Proceedings of Learning Sciences Graduate Student Conference 2018, Vanderbilt University. Nashville, TN.
Public Scholarship and Media
2022
Ecovative Blog (2022). Learning to Create with Fungi. Designer Isabel Correa's experiments ask what interspecies collaboration looks like.
Gottesman Libraries (2021). New Book Display: The Entangled World of Fungi
© 2024 CREATIVE NEST. All rights reserved.
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