About Luke Perone

Luke Perone is an academic and social therapeutic coach with more than 30 years of experience working with adults in academic and community settings. As an academic, he teaches courses, conducts research, and engages in community work in the areas of human development, life-span imaginative play, improvisation, humanitarian clowning, and socially engaged arts. His teaching, research, and activism supports and is supported by his many years studying and performing improvisational theater (improv), a form of theater and art making where groups of people collectively and spontaneously create conversations, games, and scenes together with tools such as active listening, affirming others, non judgment, curiosity, and collaboration. Luke has witnessed, and facilitated, decades of experiences where the tools of improv serve not only actors in the arts, but also all kinds of folks, to create together. Creating together supports people to grow out of the often-felt alienation, competition, anxiety, and stress in our worlds. When we create together, we lean on and support ourselves/each other and reconnect with our inherent sociality, bringing into being new possibilities for our mental and social health.

Luke brings this offer of building groups and creating together to his practice as a social therapeutic coach. In addition to drawing upon his academic and artistic background, his approach to coaching is informed by his more than 20 years of training and creating with the East Side Institute.

Social therapeutics is a radically humanizing activity. It transcends the practices in many traditional therapies in psychology that glorify the individual. It even revolutionizes the notion of group therapy/activity by not seeing a group simply as a collection of individual roles they play out of who they are. The practice of social therapeutics transforms the notion of the group by inviting diverse groups of people to come together to improvisationally, playfully, and philosophically build the group’s activity each gathering. The focus is not fixing an individual or solving someone’s problem, but is a hopeful practice of creating ensembles that support people to grow collectively. It’s a practice that creates possibilities and hope for all kinds of life activities and for all kinds of people. Social therapeutics celebrates people as social and relational beings, revolutionary improvisers, and active co-creators of their development.

I welcome creating with individuals and groups of all kinds and with all kinds of hopes to transform their lives. My specialty is supporting educators, undergraduate students, and graduate students in higher education.

Meet Luke