Kelseanne Breder

A researcher, clinician, and educator, Kelsea Breder is passionate about understanding what makes human encounters immersive and therapeutic, especially in a competitive attention economy. Prof. Breder’s research and clinical work have focused on social presence, trust, and support in digital and in-person encounters across diverse social, educational, and clinical settings.

Breder’s work is currently funded by the GACA, a 4-year career award from HRSA to address older adults’ mental wellness in an aging society where older adult psychosocial development is influenced by omnipresent tech media and growing socioeconomic inequality. Using qualitative methods, Breder’s research has explored LGBT older adults’ maintenance of social support networks and chosen families across digital interfaces. Breder's work has also focused on low-income older adults’ experiences using telehealth to have sensitive conversations about illness. She has partnered with Center for Urban Community Services to explore factors associated with aging-in-place for older adults with lived experience of homelessness through secondary data analyses and workforce education.

Breder is currently a training candidate in psychoanalysis at New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. This training informs her thinking about social presence in psychoanalytic contexts where the therapist’s attention is maximized but social elements are muted to create a therapeutic container where patients can develop trust and experience immersive healing.

As an educator, Breder uses film, theater, music, and history as frameworks to make subjective processes, like psychotherapy, more concrete and tangible to learners and future psychotherapeutic practitioners. Breder has taught graduate psychotherapy and case supervision, as well as undergraduate geriatrics, psychiatry, community health, and pharmacology courses.