OR

Browse By

Dr Véronique Richard

Research Fellow

School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences
Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences
v.richard@uq.edu.au

Overview

Dr Veronique Richard earned her doctoral degree in Sport Science from the University of Montreal and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Sport Psychology at Florida State University. Specialising in performance psychology and creativity, she has extensive experience in both research and applied settings.

Currently a research fellow at the University of Queensland, Dr Richard conducts pioneering research that integrates creativity and movement sciences to enhance performance, health, and wellbeing. Her research interests stem from her dual engagements with high-performance sports and circus arts. In her previous roles as a mental performance consultant for Canadian national sports organisations and Cirque du Soleil, Dr Richard observed the complexities of balancing high-level performance with wellbeing among athletes and performers.

To address these challenges, she designs enriched movement activities aimed at fostering creativity-supportive environments and investigates their impact on cognitive, affective, and socio-cultural variables related to creativity. Her research aspires to promote holistic growth by creating spaces where individuals can use their physicality to experiment, discover, connect, and express themselves.

While sports organisations remain a significant area of her research, Dr Richard is expanding her focus to other high-performance domains such as the medical field, educational institutions, and health and wellbeing organisations. She is also exploring how creativity-supportive environments can enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion within organisations.

Research Interests

  • Creativity, performance and wellbeing
    Balancing high-level performance and wellbeing can be challenging. My research examines how designing creativity supportive environments in various contexts (sport, school, health, etc.) can contribute to performance while fostering cognitive, affective and socio-cultural factors associated with wellbeing. Specifically, I examine the impact of implementing enriched movement activities on performance and well-being variables.
  • Performance psychology
    Applied expertise: I have worked as a mental performance consultant with various national Canadian sport organisations and with Cirque du Soleil. In addition to help athletes and artists develop mental skills, I design risk friendly environments to encourage them to navigate sport-related uncertainties and ambiguities and grow psychologically from it.
  • Creative movers
    Much can be learned from observing those that use their body to create breathtaking moments. Specifically, my interest is to better capture the processes supporting movement creativity in dancers, circus artists, figure skaters, and all those that create through the body.

Research Impacts

While societies are in constant motion, requiring creativity to adapt, our bodies have never been in such a state of inertia. Our research is impactful because it tackles two essential human needs; to create and to move. By shifting towards creativity, sport, education, and health organisations will offer rich landscapes of opportunities to ignite individuals' motivation to live a healthy life, but also equip them with the skills needed to creatively confront societal issues, thereby contributing to economic sustainability.

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy
  • Masters (Research)

Publications

View all Publications

Grants

View all Grants

Publications

Book Chapter

  • Engaging in creative behaviours and activities as a well-being and recovery approach:

    Richard, Veronique, Wergin, V. Vanessa and Cairney, John (2024). Engaging in creative behaviours and activities as a well-being and recovery approach:. Fostering Recovery and Well-being in a Healthy Lifestyle: Psychological, Somatic, and Organizational Prevention Approaches. (pp. 92-102) Taylor and Francis. doi: 10.4324/9781003250654-8

  • Kinesthetic creativity in sports and performing arts

    Richard, Veronique (2021). Kinesthetic creativity in sports and performing arts. Expertise and Excellence: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective. (pp. ---) edited by Gershon Tenenbaum and Yair Galily. Needham, MA United States: IDC University Press.

  • Sport

    Richard, Veronique (2020). Sport. Encyclopedia of Creativity. (pp. 500-505) edited by Steven Pritzker and Mark Runco. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier BV. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.23730-9

  • Giftedness

    Richard, Veronique (2019). Giftedness. Dictionary of Sport Psychology: Sport, Exercise, and Performing Arts. (pp. 115-115) edited by Dieter Hackfort, Robert J. Schinke and Bernd Strauss. New York, NY United States: Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-813150-3.00007-3

  • Grit

    Richard, Veronique (2019). Grit. Dictionary of Sport Psychology: Sport, Exercise, and Performing Arts. (pp. 117-117) edited by Dieter Hackfort, Robert J. Schinke and Bernd Strauss. New York, NY United States: Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-813150-3.00007-3

  • Group coordination

    Richard, Veronique (2019). Group coordination. Dictionary of Sport Psychology: Sport, Exercise, and Performing Arts. (pp. 119-119) edited by Dieter Hackfort, Robert J. Schinke and Bernd Strauss. New York, NY United States: New York, NY United States. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-813150-3.00007-3

Journal Article

Other Outputs

Grants (Administered at UQ)

For Media assistance please contact The Office of Marketing and Communications, (07) 3365 1120

Links

ORCID: 0000-0002-0486-9606

Scopus ID: 57198254809

Google Scholar ID: KFqikd0AAAAJ

Unit Links
Other Media
Social Media

Related Resources

Similar Staff
Researchers in Associated Units