The BPSI Ecker Fellows Program
Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts
Director: Diane O’Donoghue, PhD
Chair, BPSI Division of Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis
In the Spring of 2022 BPSI was awarded a grant from the New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis for a program in Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis, to bring creative artists to BPSI to engage with psychoanalysis.
Called the “BPSI Ecker Fellows Program“, this yearly initiative will involve a small cohort of distinguished early-to-mid career professionals in the performing arts, who will be offered an opportunity for sustained study of psychoanalytic principles in order to deepen and enrich their creative endeavors. This will occur within a program of study tailored to each artist’s interests.
The Fellows’ year is an immersive experience in psychoanalytic ideas and engagement within the BPSI community. Fellows are invited to develop an individualized program of study with their mentors, who are BPSI members selected for their commitment and knowledge of the arts, ability to complement the Fellows’ interests, and their capacity to enrich and deepen an interdisciplinary dialogue.
The areas of interest shared between psychoanalysis and the arts are rich and vast. It is our hope that the linkages the Ecker Fellows forge at BPSI will continue in several sites: amongst themselves, with the psychoanalysts with whom they share their year, and within their respective arts communities. The Ecker Fellows Program aims to develop into an established locus of interchange between psychoanalysis and the arts, for the benefit of both of these disciplines, as well as the larger community and ultimately to strengthen connections to broader public engagements.
Next accepting applications in the Spring of 2027
The 2026-2027 Ecker Fellows:
Colton Kekoa Neves
Colton Kekoa Neves is a game designer, start-up entrepreneur, and a sci-fi/fantasy author who writes at the intersection of the earnest and the absurd. Intersections, in fact, are a mainstay of his art, often combining aspects of his own intersectional identity with the strange, the divine, the bizarre, and the poignant. His forthcoming novel wonders: what if hope in the face of trauma was magic? And what if that magic still wasn’t enough to save us? He fervently believes that fiction, even the fantastic, holds the power to change how we see the world, and in doing so, change how we act in it.
Colton holds an MBA from Wharton and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, Viable Paradise, and Aspen Words. He was awarded a 2026 McCormack Writing Center Summer Fellowship. His short fiction has been published in Apex Magazine and Strange Horizons. Visit Colton’s website here.
Isa Anastasia Rivas
Isa Anastasia Rivas is a poet, playwright, & Brooklyn College MFA graduate from Los Sures, Brooklyn. Dedicating her work to the hardship, traumas, & political struggle within the Boricua Diaspora, especially the LGBTQ+ (Boricuir & Trans) communities within. Isa contributes to several on-going projects including: La Esquina ¡Presente! Bilingual Open Mic & La Cocina Workshop! She has published her work through several magazines, including The Acentos Review, Inverted Syntax, Tilted House, Apogee, The Poetry Project (Footnotes), Public Seminar, & also appears in several anthologies, such as The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. She has also had several performances put on production, including her one-act plays La Plática (New School & The Graduate Center ‘24-‘25) & The Stoop (DUAF ‘23).
Annaka Saari
Annaka Saari is a writer from Michigan living in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA from the University of Michigan in 2020 and her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 2021. She currently works at Boston University, where she serves as the administrative coordinator for the Creative Writing Program and teaches writing workshops for undergraduate students, as well as volunteers as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, the Key West Literary Seminar, the Writers’ Room of Boston, and the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture (in partnership with the Fine Arts Work Center), and has appeared in or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, 32Poems, Plume, Cleveland Review of Books, Image, and other publications. She has been awarded a Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award, a Florence Engel Randall Fiction Award, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Visit Annaka’s website here.
We are also pleased to announce the 2026-27 Ecker Faculty Mentors, more info coming soon!:
Cecil R. Webster, Jr., MD is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He serves as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, on the Board of Editors of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and as a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. He is the founder of Webster Clinic, a group practice in Boston’s Back Bay offering culturally responsive, psychodynamically informed care to children, adults, and families. His teaching on race, gender, sexuality, and belonging has reached MIT and the Biden White House. As Ecker Faculty Mentor to Colton Neves, he arrives with a kindred preoccupation: how loss moves through families, and how the fantastic makes visible what grief asks people to carry alone. He suspects psychoanalysis and fiction are cousin practices, each a room where falling apart is permitted a witness, and where what wounds a person may, carefully tended, become what powers them. Cecil will be mentoring Colton.
Diane O’Donoghue, PhD,
Director, Ecker Fellows Program
An affiliate scholar member and faculty at BPSI, where she chairs the Division of Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis, Diane is Director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.
As an art historian with a background in archaeology, she became increasingly interested in what was forgotten as part of what was retrieved, and drawn to these issues within psychoanalysis. On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury, 2019; recipient of the Robert S. Liebert Award) brought some of these threads together. Her current book project considers these long-standing interests alongside the question of posthumous harm, an inquiry indebted both to her connections to the Währinger Jewish Cemetery in Vienna and as a recent visiting fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard Visit Diane’s website.
Paul G. Ecker, MD
Paul Gerard Ecker, MD (1919-2002) was a remarkable man whose boundless curiosity and passion for learning spanned the spectrum of disciplines from the sciences to the arts. In addition to his intellectual talents and accomplishments, his greatest attributes were those one would recognize only in his company – his remarkable gentility, kindness, insight and patience in the care of his patients and his relationships with friends and family.
Born in Cleveland Ohio, he graduated from Case Western Reserve Medical School in 1944. He joined the Navy as one of the earliest Flight Surgeons and pioneered aviation medicine. After the war, he taught at The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York before completing his psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1950. In that same year he married Henriette Juliette Dumas from St Jean, Quebec. They had two sons, Hendrik Michel (1952) and Christian Paul (1955). While in New York, he was a Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute where he designed a device to cool ultracentrifuges with liquid nitrogen.
During the Korean War he was called to serve as a Flight Surgeon and researcher outside Philadelphia where the Johnsville Naval Air Station housed the largest human centrifuge in existence. Virtually all the Mercury and Gemini astronaut candidates underwent centrifuge testing at Johnsville. He became an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and a Teaching Analyst at the Philadelphia Institute for Psychoanalysis, serving a term as President. A voracious reader who studied church history, philosophy and neurosciences, he spoke three languages and could read Latin. He had a lifelong passion for art, cultivating relationships within the art world and becoming an accomplished collector of Chinese ceramics and Gothic art.
Courtesy of Christian Paul Ecker, MD
The 2022-2023 Ecker Fellows Program
After a successful inaugural year of the Ecker Fellows Program, we are pleased to share the work that the fellows and mentors created.
The 2022-2023 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsMay 2023 |
The 2023-2024 Ecker Fellows Program
We invite you to listen to our three Ecker Artists describe their experience with the Fellowship, and how engaging with psychoanalysis has influenced their work.
The 2023-2024 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsMay 2024 |
The 2024-2025 Ecker Fellows Program
We invite you to listen to our three Ecker Artists describe their experience with the Fellowship, and how engaging with psychoanalysis has influenced their work.
The 2024-2025 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsJune 2025 |
The 2025-2026 Ecker Fellows Program
We invite you to listen to our three Ecker Artists describe their experience with the Fellowship, and how engaging with psychoanalysis has influenced their work.
The 2025-2026 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsJune 2026 |
New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis
The New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis (NEFP) is privileged to to have provided the seed funding for the Ecker Fellows Program at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The NEFP is a non-profit, 501(c)3 public charity that was founded in 1995. The NEFP’s mission is to use psychoanalytic knowledge in ways to benefit the community, and includes the Ecker Fund, which gives grants to support interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies. The Ecker Fund was given to the NEFP to honor the memory of Paul G. Ecker, MD.
