Lee Potts, Ph.D., Boulder Psychotherapy Institute Distinguished Guest Workshop leader, is a theater director and international performance coach. She has worked with thousands of people over the past 45 years on communications skills and personal effectiveness. She creates safe, playful environments for trying on new ways of being in the world. With training in Gestalt therapy, she is especially suited to help therapists and others enhance expressiveness and creativity, free breath/voice/body, and build a confident, relaxed style for everything from public presentations to phone messages and working individually with clients. Lee assists people wanting to free up and put forward their most centered, authentic, expressive selves.

Lee holds a doctorate in Communication and Performance and has always been passionate about facilitating personal growth using techniques derived from theatre and communication. This passion, essentially psychological in orientation, was ignited in her doctoral dissertation, The Genesis and Evolution of the Creative Personality: A Rankian Analysis of "The Diary of Anais Nin." Dr. Otto Rank, a psychologist who split from Freud in 1926 after a close relationship of twenty years, based his theories of the creative personality upon the existential premise of free will and the belief in an internal imperative to self-creation. Rank's ideas form the basis for Lee's study of Nin's growth as an artist and woman.

Lee is an Emerita Professor of Theater and Dance at CU Boulder, where she taught performance-oriented courses for 31 years and directed many plays, including productions for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Another passion (perhaps influenced by living in Japan as a child) has been traveling, living and working abroad. Two favorite experiences include directing the Scandinavian premiere of an American play and supervising The London Semester Program. During her teaching years, Lee simultaneously coached individuals privately and conducted a large variety of workshops. Her "swan song" from CU was the Colorado premiere of Eve Eysler's The Vagina Monologues, collaboratively staged and expanded with Lee's cast of thirteen women. [Link to Colorado Daily article] At retirement she received a national career achievement award and two CU women faculty awards.

Since retiring from CU, Lee has continued to direct theatre pieces [Link to livingportraitsindance.com], but her primary focus is on performance coaching, working as a Faculty Ombuds at CU, and working on certification as a Gestalt therapist. She is currently a Distinguished Guest Workshop Presenter at the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, where she works with therapists on presentation skills. In her ombuds work, she assists faculty in exploring options for conflict resolution, sometimes including informal mediation. She offers both workshops and individual performance coaching. Therapists say that her workshops make them more attentive to vocal/nonverbal cues from clients and hence aid them in helping clients present themselves more effectively both personally and professionally. She is available to work collaboratively with therapists who wish to send clients for work on creativity and self-presentation skills. She is also available for work with the general public.