Stephanie Scopelitis
Educator, Learning Scientist, Qualitative Researcher, Author of Body Talk
Stephanie Scopelitis is an educator, learning scientist, and qualitative researcher. Her life as a professional dancer carried her into a deeper study of human interaction and the body. She has built her work on a fundamental belief: we understand and navigate the world through our bodies.
She designs experiences that pull from her life as an artist, educator, and researcher to help people think, create, and solve problems together through deliberate use of gesture and embodied interaction.
Her main home is where teaching and learning happen. She teaches and mentors across learning spaces and subject matters, from prisons to K-12 and higher ed classrooms, in courses on social entrepreneurship, creative thinking, ethics, pedagogy, and arts integration. She brings interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches to all her work, treating gesture and the body as cognitive, communicative, and interactional resources.
Her practice spans research labs, community arts programs, and product teams—including collaborations with educators, designers, organizations, and the healthcare sector. She helps them recognize and make deliberate use of gestures and embodied interaction to move learning, collaboration, and creative work forward. She shares this understanding through teaching, consulting, workshops, publishing, and conference presentations.
You will often find Stephanie engaged in gesture-filled conversations dotted with phrases like "Why do you suppose?" "What if…?" and "I have an idea." She can't stop herself from turning the gestures she observes into quick dance sketches on the spot. Challenge her with one—she loves it.
Stephanie holds an MFA in Dance and a PhD in Learning Sciences from the University of Washington. She completed her undergraduate studies in English and Philosophy at Indiana University, after dropping out 4 times. She also studied at Yale Divinity School, examining the body as a theological text.
Stephanie is also the co-author of Body Talk: Using Gestures to Rethink Human-Centered Products with Dane DeSutter.
Stephanie is also the co-author of Body Talk: Using Gestures to Rethink Human-Centered Products with Dane DeSutter.
