Connecting knowledge
Elsa Lechner offers training, guidance, tutoring, and biographical workshops and Creative Camps (Residencies). In addition to the technical aspects of writing, research, and training, her work incorporates a narrative approach that aims to promote personal reflection, the discovery of individual and collective repertoires, and the strengthening of the connection between subjects, their creativity, and their social and cultural contexts of experience.
Over time, he has developed a group method that can be applied in a variety of areas: from formal and informal education to community action, human resource management, teamwork, and the creation of creative, academic, and organizational projects. Lechner works with groups and individuals who seek to become aware of their needs and challenges, using a narrative approach that promotes nonviolent communication, empathy, sensitive listening, and respect for cultural diversity.
About Elsa
Daughter of a Hungarian father of Austrian descent—a journalist, teacher, and communicator—and a Lisbon-born mother, a scientist and university professor in the field of biochemistry and molecular genetics, Elsa experienced early on the marks that collective history inevitably leaves on the private lives of individuals. She also witnessed, within her own family, the challenges of intercultural coexistence and the pursuit of dreams of justice, freedom, and liberation from life experiences that affect well-being.
Indeed, her father was a refugee who fled at the age of 18 from the Soviet tanks that invaded Budapest in November 1956. He was later welcomed by a French family in Lille, where he studied journalism, lived as a stateless person, and met his future wife. Her mother, in turn, was escaping the suffocating atmosphere of Portugal’s dictatorship in the 1960s, seeking freedom and the continuation of her studies in another country. They lived for several years in Paris—he as an intern at Le Monde and Agence France Presse, and she as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute.
Elsa is the third and youngest child of this couple, born in Lisbon one year after her brother and two years after her sister. A discreet and sensitive child, she spent her time dancing, singing, and acting, with the living room as her stage—set up by her cousin Marina after Saturday lunches. She began singing in choirs at the age of five and has continued singing in choirs ever since. She still dances today and has been involved in theater for many years, having received formal training in some specific techniques.
Deeply interested in the meaning of life experiences, in research, education, and artistic and creative expression, she combines her academic background in social sciences and her long-standing experience facilitating biographical workshops in various contexts and with diverse groups, with the creative potential of narrative and group practices.
She finds great joy in teaching classes, supervising projects, guiding research and personal inquiry processes, leading biographical workshops, and of course, engaging in theater, dance, and choral singing.
With her multilingual education and background, Elsa has taught classes, given lectures, and facilitated biographical workshops in several languages, including: English, French, Spanish, Italian, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese.