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

“We planted over 10 million trees in 2020 alone. And it’s one tree planted for every dollar donated, so we make it as simple as possible, but when you add it all up together the impact is just tremendous and growing every day.” Diana Chaplin is the Canopy Director of One Tree Planted, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a mission to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees. Her rol...

Diana Chaplin is the Canopy Director of One Tree Planted, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a mission to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees. Her role is focused on managing communications, marketing, and storytelling around the many reforestation projects that the organization conducts. She's a holistic thinker who applies the wisdom of nature's systems towards creating con...

“Now I think we’re in another culture war. I think we’re in, as we see the realm of cancel culture in social media and this very polarising war between the liberal left and the conservative right. I think that we’re in another culture and a lot of it is centering around gender and race. If you look at what’s happened to black women athletes in the last couples of months, the censuring of their bod...

Professor Micol Hebron is a video and performance artist who works out of Los Angeles. Professor Hebron has studied at UCSD, Academia di Belle Arti at Università di Venezia, and UCLA. She founded Gallery B12, a cooperative artists-run exhibition and lecture space in Hollywood. Hebron co-produced the Full Nelson Festival a showcase of international performance art and, in 2004, founded the LA Art G...

“People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the peopl...

Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers ; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women ; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It , and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats . She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light . Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan a...

“Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that l...

Dr. Suzanne Simard is a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. In 2016, she gave a TED talk about her groundbreaking discovery of how trees communicate with each other. Most recently, Dr. Simard has published a book called Finding the Mother Tree . Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar ) and her TED talks have been viewed by mor...

“There’s this children’s book called Miss Rumphius , and I’ve carried it around with me my entire life. It’s about a woman who grandfather tells her three things, and the last one in the most difficult thing of all and that’s to fill the world with beauty. And I give this book to every one of my friends who are having babies, I have a copy with me almost at all times, and I’m reminded of that feel...

Alice Brooks is a cinematographer who has worked on award-winning features, television and commercials. She is a graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where her creative partnership with director Jon Chu first began. Since, they have worked on several projects together, most recently on the film In The Heights based on the musical by Lin Manuel Miranda. Brooks is known for her use of dramatic...

“I started Women in Media in 2010 as a sort of community group. We talked about women above and below the line because there weren’t any organizations or conversations really happening about women in the below the line positions, meaning women in the crew who are in the camera, art, grip and electronics departments. There were only conversations happening about more women directors and, being a sc...

Tema Staig is the Executive Director of Women in Media, a non-profit organization that promotes gender equality in the film and TV industry. Tema is also a production designer, an art director known for her work on feature films such as Kissing Jessica Stein and American Splendor.  Allison Vanore is the secretary and treasurer of Women in Media. Allison is also the Emmy Award-winning producer...

“The ancient Greeks had technology in their DNA. And you can understand this in their religion because, they had a god for technology, Hephaistos. I remembered it while we are discussing this shield and thorax. They were made with fire and a hammer. And this was doing the work of the god Hephaistos. His characteristic tool was a fire and a hammer.” The Museum Herakleidon was founded in 2004 by Mr....

The Museum Herakleidon was founded in 2004 by Mr. and Mrs. Firos and extends to two buildings in the historic district of Thissio, next to the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus. The first building is located at 16 Herakleidon str. and the second one 150 meters further, at 37 Ap. Pavlou str., one of the busiest pedestrian streets of Athens. During the first decade of its ope...

“At first when I began writing these books, people told me that they didn’t think there was an audience for them. They thought it was a kind of niche subject, nobody was really that interested in it. And then gradually it became clear that there’s a surprisingly big audience of people that really have a craving for Classical wisdom and are interested in history, in the relationship between history...

Donald Robertson is a writer, cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). He is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy, specifically Stoicism. He has been doing public speaking for over two decades and has spoken on over a hundred podcasts, webinars, and conferences. H...

“This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.” Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and The Life You Can Save , he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. No...

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and The Life You Can Save , he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at d...

“I think direct contact with the material should be important to every sculptor because I think once you lose that it becomes a second-hand process. It’s one of the reasons the casting process isn’t so interesting to me just because the final product, the final piece has not been touched by the artist. There’s no relationship with the mind that conceived the piece or designed it. I think something...

Born in Cedar Falls Iowa and raised in New York City Mark Mennin graduated with a degree in History from Princeton University, where he also taught ceramics under Toshiko Takaezu. He began to carve stone in Italy in 1984, and worked there for three years, executing commissions and preparing for solo shows in New York. From 1989-1993, he worked in Paris, The scale of his sculpture has evolved to gi...

“I have three missions, topics of conversation, ideas for exhibitions and really discussions that we want to bring to life at the House, and those are stories of African-Americans, racial conflict, and social justice, as well as women and women’s stories, suffrage, and finally Wilson’s international legacy and how he was seen after the Great War. I think those three topics are topics that resonate...

Elizabeth Karcher is the Executive Director of the President Wilson House in Washington, D.C., a site owned and managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Elizabeth manages the strategy and operations of this historic house and museum. The site’s current focus is on the themes of African American history, women’s history, and Wilson’s international impact. In addition to telling the...

“We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by...

Sébastien Gokalp is the director of France’s National Museum of Immigration. He has managed projects at Centre Pompidou and musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and curated exhibitions of Andy Warhol, Lucio Fontana, Robert Crumb, and others. He curates at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and teaches at the Ecole du Louvre. Recognizing that immigration is one of today’s most important issues, he se...

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State , was the winner of the 1991 Editor’s Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox...