Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780981559377)

Lily emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate school of Fine Arts. A successful painter and professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, Lily traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. Over the 1980s, Lily gradually realized that being an artist "is not just about making art . . . It is about delivering the vision one is given . . . and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself." She founded The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia and continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world.

Lily is most noted for transforming an urban neighborhood in North Philadelphia into an inner-city work of art. Once an empty lot, Yeh worked with the community to create an interactive park space filled with gardens and mosaics.

Lily's vision has rippled out far beyond North Philadelphia's borders. She inspires and collaborates with prison inmates to create beauty and art, and does the same with thousands of adults and children who live in some of the world's most broken communities. She has collaborated with residents of the Korogocho slum near Nairobi to enliven a barren churchyard with colorful murals and sculptures and traveled to Ghana, Ecuador, The Ivory Coast and the Republic of Georgia to work on similar projects. Her most recent endeavor is the Rwanda Healing Project, in which she worked with hundreds of children and families to transform their bleak village into a place of beauty and joy.