Dr. Houston was the protégé of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who instructed her in the workings of organizations and power structures in many different cultures. With the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston frequently co-led seminars and workshops aimed at understanding interrelationships between ancient myths and modern societies.

Additionally, Jean Houston has made cross-cultural studies of educational and healing methods in Asia and Africa. Her principal areas of interest apart from her work are theater, archaeology and the philosophical, societal and other implications of contemporary physics. Dr. Houston's mind has been called "a national treasure".

Her specialty is in the development and application of multiple methods of increasing physical and mental skills, learning and creativity. She has presented the results of her work and studies in some 17 books, as well as in person through speeches and conferences at educational institutions and business organizations in over 40 countries. She is often invited to work personally with leaders of such groups, as well as heads of governmental and non-governmental agencies, to assist them in rethinking their goals and agendas.

As Advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, she has worked to implement some of their extensive educational and health programs, primarily in Myanmar [Burma] and Bangladesh.

A past President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology [1977], she has taught philosophy, psychology, and religion at Hunter College, the New School for Social Research and Marymount College, as well as summer sessions in human development at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of British Columbia. She was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Oklahoma in that university's Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program in 1982.

In addition, Dr. Houston presented the William James Lecture at Harvard Divinity School, the ORR Lectures at Wilson, and the Alfred Stiernotte Lecture in Philosophy at Quinnipiac College. Since 1959, she has spoken at hundreds of colleges and universities, including the Universities of Montreal, Arizona, South Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado. She has directed two three-year courses in human capacities development and a program of cross-cultural mythic and spiritual studies, now in its thirteenth year.

Among the academic and scientific convocations she has chaired was the United Nations--Temple of Understanding conference of World Religious Leaders in 1975. She also helped to initiate and then chaired the 1979 symposium for leading government policy makers sponsored by the Department of Commerce.

Her work has been the core of hundreds of teaching-learning communities throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. In 1984, she devised a national not-for-profit organization, called The Possible Society, to encourage the creation of new ways for people to work together to help solve societal problems.

In 1985, Dr. Houston was awarded the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Association of Teacher Educators. In 1993, she received the Gardner Murphy Humanitarian Award and the INTA Humanitarian of the Year award. In 1994, she received the Lifetime Outstanding Creative Achievement Award from the Creative Education Foundation.

">