The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

Douglas Wolk is the author of the NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels , and the Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics and the host of the podcast Voice of Latveria. A National Arts Journalism Program fellow, Wolk has written about comic books, graphic novels, pop music, and technology for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate , and Pitchfork...

"When I look at a film, I normally think what is missing from that, and that's what I'm trying to bring. I'm trying to find something that I think isn't there and that I could bring that would make it more interesting, make it more cinematic, more dramatic." Carter Burwell is an Academy Award nominated composer of film soundtracks. He has had a long working relationship with filmmakers the Coen br...

Carter Burwell is an Academy Award nominated composer of film soundtracks. He has had a long working relationship with filmmakers the Coen brothers, scoring every film they have made, as well as all of Spike Jonze's films. His credits include Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, True Grit, Carol, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, The Hudsucker Proxy, Rob Roy, Fargo, The Spanish Prisoner, G...

“We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected. What would we like people to learn about Native Americans? I was an educator for over 21 years, so for me it's probably overcoming fear from the outside and fear from the inside to know the outside, so there needs to be...

The Shinnecock are a nation of Native Americans made up of 12 Algonquian-speaking tribes. This nation occupied the territory between Long Island and Connecticut, today their descendants live on a 400-acre reservation in Southampton and have over 1,200 enrolled members. Mia visited the Shinnecock reservation to do this interview with photographer and founder of Ma’s House BIPOC Art Studio Jeremy De...

“Usually we just see the soundbites and the news and then there's a new one or a new story, the politics that takes away from what these families are going. These people in these towns are just glossed over, looked over. And that's not the case in real life. They live with this trauma forever…What I hope the next generation takes is just to absorb everything from our generation and our parents’ ge...

Born out of Boston’s public housing system, JP Ouellette moved to Los Angeles after graduating film school. He has assisted creatives such as Richard Kelly, Michael Ohoven, Gary Fleder, and James Manos, Jr., before being hired to write the horror film “Captured” and launching his own creative shingle, Circa 1888, Inc. JP has since written a true war adaptation “Qaddafi's Point Guard” for a major s...

Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally organized more than 25 exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body, Gothic: Dark Glamour, A Queer History of Fashion, and Paris, Capital of Fashion. She is founder and editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, the first peer-reviewed,...

Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Chair of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, Co-Chair of the UN Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of S...

“If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…Specifically, target 4.7 which says that everybody should learn about sustainable development. Every...

"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darknes...

Mark Seliger was born in Amarillo, Texas. He was Rolling Stones chief photographer for 20 years, where he shot over 150 covers silica shoots frequently for Vanity Fair, GQ, Italian Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, L, and other magazines. His advertising work includes projects for Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Levi's, Netflix and Ralph Lauren. Seliger received the Alfred Eisenstadt Award, Clio Grand Prix, the C A...

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives...

“Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the...

Bruce Piasecki, PhD., NYTimes bestselling author (A New Way to Wealth, Doing More with Teams, Missing Persons, 2040: A Fable), is founder of AHC Group, Inc. a global management consulting firm advising major corporations on social response capitalism, sustainability, and innovation. Piasecki has been an agent of climate solutions for over 40 years. He’s also co-founder of Creative F...

John Marciari is Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum. Marciari oversees a collection that is renowned throughout the world. Drawings and Prints is one of the largest of the Morgan’s curatorial departments and its approximately 25,000 works span the fourteenth century through the nineteenth century. The department is especial...

“Thinking about the future of the environments more broadly and the challenges of global development, we need to remember that freedom from infectious disease is not a privilege that is universally shared. And so in order to continue to improve global public health, it's vitally important that people in poor countries have access to opportunities for economic growth Human well-being is both a ques...

Dimitrios Pandermalis is Professor Emeritus of Classical Archeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has served as President of the History and Archeology Department and Dean of the Philosophical School. He is the President of the Acropolis Museum, and Director of Aristotle University's archeological excavations at the ancient site of Dion on the foothills of Mount Olympus. Th...

Kyle Harper is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics and Letters, Senior Advisor to the President, and Provost Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma.  Harper’s fourth book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History , is a global history of infectious disease spanning from human origins to COVID-19. It tells the story of hu...

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. www.creativeprocess.info

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. www.creativeprocess.info

“Artistic creativity and it’s crucial to artistic creativity amongst many other things. In artistic creativity, from my viewpoint, is that you start off with an idea and you’re shaping and you’re totally in control and it doesn’t matter if it's music or sculpture or painting or a novel, eventually the thing sparks its own life, becomes itself, and at that point, the role of the artist is to stand...

Dr. George Ellis is a South African theoretical physicist who is considered to be a world leader in relativity theory and cosmology. He has published over 500 scientific papers and several books including The Large scale Structure of Space Time, which he co-authored with Steven Hawking in 1973. He is an active Quaker and won the Templeton Prize in 2004 for his exceptional contribution to...

Jane Alexander is an actress, writer, and conservationist. She chaired the National Endowment for the Art from 1993-1997. A Tony Award winner and member of the  Theatre Hall of Fame, Alexander has performed in more than a hundred plays. Her long film career includes four Academy Award nominations, for The Great White Hope, All The President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Testament. She has bee...

Jane Alexander is an actress, writer, and conservationist. She chaired the National Endowment for the Art from 1993-1997. A Tony Award winner and member of the  Theatre Hall of Fame, Alexander has performed in more than a hundred plays. Her long film career includes four Academy Award nominations, for The Great White Hope, All The President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Testament. She has bee...