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Biography

Connie Corley, MSW, MA, PhD, has a long history of engagement in the fields of gerontology and geriatrics—since her graduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor beginning in the late 1970s. As a doctoral faculty member in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University, Dr. Corley led a team to establish a doctoral concentration in Creative Longevity and Wisdom/Aging, emerging from an initiative within the Institute for Social Innovation. She has been on the Planning Committee of the international Positive Aging conferences for the last four years and serves on two boards at California State University, Los Angeles (the Lifelong Learning Program she co-founded in 2004, and the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics). She is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University.

A Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, Dr. Corley has earned numerous awards of distinction. She has been engaged in multiple programs with the Hartford Geriatric Social Work Initiative as a mentor and leader in curriculum development. She was also a mentor in the American Society on Aging’s New Ventures in Leadership program.

Her recent work has involved creativity in later life (emerging out of a national study of Holocaust survivors, led by Roberta Greene, PI). While interviewing survivors in their homes, she found that several had engaged in artistic pursuits, largely in the later years of their lives. Dr. Corley created the "Experience, Engagement, Expression" model, demonstrating successive levels of engagement and wider ranging expression of creativity based on life experiences. Building on this work, Dr. Corley is exploring entrepreneurship as a way to bring rich life experience to engage others and express through the creative process of generating and implementing innovations. She is launching an intergenerational/intercultural mutual mentoring program in diverse communities of Los Angeles that incorporates creativity and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Corley co-hosts and produces a radio program at Pacifica station KPFK-FM in Los Angeles (Experience Talks), interviewing guests who are seasoned in life. Her website is www.conniecorleyphd@gmail.com. She can be reached at ccorley@fielding.edu