CREATIVITY |
The
Creativity Workshop is based in New York City and is taught around the
world.
It was established in 1993 by writer Shelley Berc
and multimedia artist Alejandro Fogel to provide
an alternative to traditional forms of education and thinking. The organization
is dedicated to teaching individuals and groups about their creative processes.
Faculty
Shelley Berc,
Director, Faculty
Alejandro Fogel, Director, Faculty
Ron Botting, Faculty
Patricia Foster, Faculty
Kirpal Singh, Faculty
Anita Stewart, Faculty
Meredith
Stricker, Faculty
Sue Woolfe, Faculty
Administration
Vivian Glusman, Administrative Associate
Mira Stein, Customer Service
Ceci Glusman, Administrative Assistant
Yan Kuznetsov, Administrative Assistant
Shelley Berc
Shelley
Berc writes fiction, plays, and essays on the creative process. Her theatre
pieces have starred many notable actors, such as Patrick Stewart, Stanley
Tucci, and Tony Shalhoub. Berc was Professor of the International Writing
Program and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa from
1985-2000. Her numerous awards include the prestigious two year Pew/TCG
National Theatre Artists Residency for $100,000, two Lila Wallace/Readers
Digest awards, TCG Artists Residency travel grant, McKnight Fellowship,
National Jewish Culture Playwriting award, Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship,
NEA Opera/Music librettist fellowship, and an Outer Critics Circle nomination
for best off-Broadway play. Her plays and adaptations of the classic,s
and symphony and dance texts have been performed in such venues as the
American Repertory Theatre, Yale Rep, CSC, Portland Stage, ACT-San Francisco,
Seattle Rep, The Walker Arts Center, Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, Chicago
Symphony, Festival d'Avignon and the Edinburgh Festival. Her plays include
A Girls Guide to the Divine Comedy, Dual Heads, Burn Out, Shooting Shiva,
and several award winning musical adaptations of classical plays. She
wrote Rameau's Nephew, based on Diderot's work, with long time collaborator,
director Andrei Belgrader, which starred Tony Shalhoub. Yale Rep premiered
their musical adaptation (with composer Rusty Magee) of Scapin, with Stanley
Tucci in the title role. It was nominated for best play of the year by
the Outer Critics Circle Award. The American Repertory Theatre , under
the artistic directorship of Robert Brustein, premiered several Berc/Belgrader/
Magee musical adaptations of classical plays, including The Imaginary
Invalid, The Servant of Two Masters, and the cult classic Ubu Rock, which
they based on Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi.
Berc’s novel, The Shape of Wilderness, was published by Coffee House
Press. The New York Times called it "a vividly imagined parable...a
strange and potent book...a fantastical world of unusual sensuality and
invention". Her plays and essays have been published by Performing
Arts Journal, Johns Hopkins Press, Yale Theater Magazine, Drama Review,
TCG, and Chain. Her fiction and poetry have been published in literary
magazines such as BOMB, Web del Sol, and Exquisite Corpse. She and her
husband Alejandro Fogel have been cultural ambassadors for the US State
Department's Arts America Program, lecturing in their artistic fields
and teaching workshops in creativity in Hungary, Rumania, Australia, and
Italy. Berc is a graduate of Amherst College and the Yale School of Drama.
Alejandro
Fogel
Alejandro Fogel is a multimedia artist working in painting, writing,
installations, video, travel-performance, and digital art. He has exhibited
his work in galleries and museums in Argentina, Bulgaria, Cuba, France,
Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United States and Germany.
Since he had his first experience of the Andes, Mr. Fogel became deeply
involved with the history and art of Pre-Columbian cultures and subsequently
the roots of individuals in culture and the legacy of heritage. Since
1995 he has been creating art works that follow the footsteps of his father's
journey from a Hassidic youth in Transylvania through the years of the
Holocaust in labor camps and in hiding and his subsequent emigration to
Argentina where Fogel was born.
Alejandro Fogel has received many awards and honors. He was a Fellow and
a 2 year artist-in-residence of the Institute of Current World Affairs.
He was an artist in residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and
Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. He was selected by The Rolex Award
for Enterprise in Geneva, Switzerland, which included the publication
of his project The Inkas Road. His awards are numerous; they include,
the Arche Biennal Award in Painting, the National Endowment for the Arts
of Argentina First Prize in Painting, The Pio Collivadino Award at the
Argentine National Gallery of Art, and the Richard Wagner International
Association Award in Painting.
Alejandro Fogel worked with the Argentine Commission of Visual Arts helping
to develop a native folk artists archive. He also established and taught
a series of visual arts workshops for indigenous cultures living in remote
areas of the Andes and Patagonia.
Alejandro Fogel's works are in museums and public and private collections
in Argentina, United States, France, Brazil, Uruguay, Israel, Italy, Netherlands,
Saudi Arabia and Canada.
Additional
Faculty
Ron
Botting
Ron Botting has a background in acting, directing, dance, and education.
He has taught workshops at Shakespeare & Company which focused on
personal connection to language, releasing the natural voice, and exploring
the actor/audience relationship. He studied and managed voice workshops
for the illustrious voice teacher Kristin Linklater. He has taught text
interpretation and performance to students in Massachusetts and Maine.
He has also taught at the Maine College of Art in their Graphic Design
Institute. His directing experience includes work at Portland Stage and
Sundance Festival, produced by Robert Redford. A member of Actors Equity,
he has performed with numerous theatre companies, including New York Theater
Workshop, Portland Stage Company, HERE, Naked Angels, Primary Stages,
and Shakespeare & Company.
Patricia
Foster
Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (memoir), Just Beneath
My Skin (personal essays; starred review from Kirkus Reviews) and the
editor of Minding the Body and Sister to Sister. She won the PEN/Jerard
Fund Award, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Hoepfner Award, and the
Dean?s Scholar Award for nonfiction, received a Florida Arts Council Award,
the Lake Effect Fiction Award, and a Yaddo Fellowship for fiction as well
as four Alabama Arts & Humanities grants. Her work has been reviewed
in The New York Times Book Review, Atlanta Journal & Constitution,
Vogue, Chronicle for Higher Education, Glamour, Ploughshares as well as
other newspapers and journals. She?s published both nonfiction and fiction
in the Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review,
Glimmer Train and other quarterlies. She received her MFA from the Iowa
Writers? Workshop and her Ph.D. from Florida State University. She is
a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa
and has been an exchange professor in France.
Kirpal
Singh
Professor Kirpal Singh is recognized internationally
as an expert in the field of creativity development and is a frequent
a keynoter speaker at conferences and seminars on Creativity & Innovation.
He is the founding Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at
the Singapore Management University, where he is a professor and teaches
courses in creative thinking. Dr. Singh's latest book, "Thinking
Hats & Colored Turbans" (Prentice-Hall, 2004), deals with the
exploration of creativity in business, art, science, and life. He has
been a consultant in innovation to several large corporations (such as
AMEX, IBM, Singapore Airlines, L'Oreal). Singh is also a fiction writer
and poet. This year he is a visiting writer at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, teaching poetry. He is the author of 15 books and more
than 40 journal articles. Singh, a recipient of numerous writing awards,
has given readings of his work at Literature & Arts Festivals all
over the world, including The Edinburgh, Cambridge, York, Adelaide, Toronto,
and Sydney Festivals. He has lectured and served as a writer-in-residence
at universities in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, UK, USA, India,
Philippines, Mexico, Germany, Italy, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, and
Hungary. In 1997 he was Distinguished International Writer at the world-famous
University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2005 Professor Singh
became the first non-American to be appointed to the American Creativity
Association’s Board.
Anita
Stewart
Anita Stewart is the artistic director of Portland Stage Company. Under
her guidance the theatre has produced many new plays and shepherded them
to national productions. She is an award winning set designer and has
worked in that capacity at Yale Rep, Guthrie Theatre, and the American
Repertory Theatre, among others. She has taught design at universities
throughout the US, including the University of Iowa and Yale. SAnita taught
at the University of Iowa in Iowa City as an Associate Professor in Design
from 1993 to1996. She also taught at the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, as a Visiting Professor. She graduated in 1988 from the Yale
School of Drama where she won the Klausen design fellowship for two years.
Ms. Stewart has participated in the Shannon Leadership Institute in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, an institute focused on values and renewal for ileaders in
the not for profit sector. Ms. Stewart has been a panelist for the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Alpert
Awards.
Meredith Stricker
Meredith Stricker is a noted poet and visual artist. She is the author
of Alphabet Theater, a ground-breaking collection of performance poetry
and visual art from Wesleyan University Press. Her most recent collection
of poetry, Tenderness Shore, received the National Poetry Series Award.
Her work has appeared in numerous and publications including: Ploughshares,
Volt, Conjunctions, chain, rooms, Five Fingers Review, The Iowa Review
and anthologies from Norton and Milkweed Press. Recent mixed media art
and video has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Center and the Monterey
Museum of Art Biennial. Her essays and images, Things That Shine, received
a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. The Prairie of the Imagination,
a poetry video and documentary, received an Iowa Arts Council Grant. She
received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Writers Workshop at the University
of Iowa. She has taught on-going poetry and inter-arts workshops at the
University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival where she was known for her
ability to reach out to a wide range of students of many levels.
Sue
Woolfe
Sue Woolfe is a writer of both fiction
and creative non-fiction. She is also a well known teacher of writing,
focusing on the writing journey and finding the writer's unique voice.
Her novel, Leaning Towards Infinity, about two generations of women mathematicians,
won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 1996 and was shortlisted
for many other prizes, including the prestigious US Tiptree Prize. It
was also professionally performed as a stage play, as was her first novel,
Painted Woman. In her current non-fiction book, "The Mystery of the
Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience", Woolfe
explores what science and brain imaging teach us about the creative imagination
and how to make it work for us. She shows that we can learn to be creative,
not by a valiant act of will, but by learning to follow the brain techniques
of creative people.Her other creative nonfiction books include: Making
Stories: How Ten Australian Novels were Written, co-authored with Kate
Grenville, and Wild Minds, an assemblage of stories from some of last
century's most daring authors, including Marguerite Duras, Flannery O'Connor,
Italo Calvino and Joseph Conrad. In her latest novel, The Secret Cure,
she has written a profoundly moving tale which explores new ways of what
it means to be human, to be normal, to be honourable and above all what
it means to love. Woolfe's books have been published internationally.
She lives in Australia and is a professor of creative writing at Sydney
University.
Any Questions?
Call us at: 1 (212) 767-9815
Creativity
Workshop
We can help you learn to be more creative.
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