On Somatics and Creative Leadership

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What is creative leadership? It could mean leadership that’s distributed and collaborative, rather than top-down and authoritarian. It could mean leadership that’s flexible enough to continually reinvent its structures and approaches to meet emerging circumstances. It could mean leadership that views diversity and difference as opportunities for learning, growth, and creative synergy rather than as problems to be managed. It could be leadership that actively works toward envisioning and manifesting more positive futures. Ideally, creative leadership is all if this, and also our leaders are fully embodied individuals.

Join CIIS faculty Dr. Alfonso Montuori and Dr. Nick Walker for an illuminating conversation exploring the potential role of somatic practices in creative leadership.

Somatic practices are practices that aim to bring about positive psychological change through intentional adjustments to how one uses one’s body. Dr. Montuori, a founding faculty member in the Transformative Leadership program at CIIS and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures, and Dr. Walker, a somatic psychologist and longtime practitioner/teacher of aikido and other forms of somatic work, will examine how such practices can help us to cultivate the psychological capacities associated with effective creative leadership.

Meet the Hosts

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Alfonso Montuori, Ph.D. is an educator, consultant, and musician. With an Italian father and Dutch mother, Alfonso was born in the Netherlands, an Italian citizen, and grew up a “third culture kid” living in Lebanon, Greece, and England. He studied at the University of London before moving to the U.S. in his mid-20s to go to graduate school. In the mid-'80s he taught at the Central South University in Hunan, China, and then returned to the U.S permanently. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Fine Arts Department of Miami University and in the Dynamic and Clinical Psychology Department of Sapienza University of Rome. Alfonso is the author of several books and numerous articles on the future, epistemology, creativity, leadership, transdisciplinarity, complexity, and education. Most recently he co-edited The Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures with Gabrielle Donnelly (Routledge, 2022) and authored Integrative Transdisciplinarity: Scholarship for Creativity and Complexity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). His work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. Alfonso is Co-Editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, and on the editorial board of numerous academic journals. He has consulted with organizations and individuals in the US, Europe, and Asia on creativity, complexity and leadership development. In the 1970s and early 80s he worked as a musician in London performing and recording with several bands, and also started his own indie record label, Banana Records, in 1979. He has performed with or produced artists including Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joe Louis Walker, Charles Brown, and Aztec Camera. An active musician, he performs and records playing saxophones, flute, and electronic wind instrument. Alfonso collaborates with his wife, award-winning jazz singer Kitty Margolis, playing in her band and co-producing her recordings.
 

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Dr. Nick Walker has taught in multiple degree programs at CIIS since 2010, and has been one of the principal architects of our undergraduate programs in Psychology and Psychedelic Studies. His work explores the edges and intersections of depth psychology, somatic psychology, cognition, embodiment, and creativity. He holds a 7th degree black belt in aikido and serves as senior aikido teacher at the Aiki Arts Center in Berkeley. Dr. Walker is known for his foundational work on neurodiversity and his influential essay collection Neuroqueer Heresies. His other published works include chapters in such books as Diverse Bodies Diverse Practices and The Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures, and he has co-edited multiple volumes of the annual lit anthology Spoon Knife. He also writes speculative fiction, including the urban fantasy webcomic Weird Luck.

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