Cinematographer
I think ultimately the writing and the performances are the foundation of any good project, but I think that cinematography can either elevate or undermine both the writing or the performances, depending on how it’s treated and how it’s executed. So, to me, it’s a fundamental part of the process.
Award-Winning Screenwriter & Novelist
Tim Burton had just Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. He was at some point in the making of Beetlejuice. Our agency didn’t know what to do with either of us with our off-kilter sensibility, so they introduced us, and we immediately felt a kinship and became friends. It was pretty clear from pretty early on that we wanted to work together. We threw out ideas. Among the ideas we talked about Tim mentioned to me a drawing he had made in high school of a character who had scissors instead of hands. And I said, ‘Stop right there!; First of all, this may surprise you, it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard in my life, so I knew it was brilliant. It was so simple and so stupid and such an obvious metaphor, I knew that it had power beyond belief. I said, ‘Stop, I know exactly what to do with that!’
Author of The Silk Code · The Plot to Save Socrates
Musician · Professor
Paul Levinson is an author, musician, and professor at Fordham University, where he teaches communications and media studies. His fiction and non-fiction work has been translated into 16 languages, and includes the sci-fi novels The Silk Code and The Plot to Save Socrates. Before his academic career, he spent much of the late 1960s and early 70s as a singer-songwriter, writing over 100 songs. He returned to music in 2020 with the release of his album “Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time.”
Award-winning Author, Screenwriter, Showrunner & Producer
The Wire · The Deuce · We Own This City
I do want to point out–many writers don’t want to admit to it or say it–it’s just words on a page until everybody else makes it come alive. You had Idris Elba and Wood Harris acting in that scene. I had Joe Chappelle shooting it. He was the director. All the craftsmen and artists that worked on that made it what it is. And that’s actually what I like about it. It’s why I continue to work in television. I like working with all these artists. I like getting together with these people and making something together. It’s not just the writing. It’s everything that everybody contributes to make it what it is.
Producer of Clifford the Big Red Dog · The Smurfs · Charlotte’s Web · The Mighty Ducks · Fried Green Tomatoes · When A Man Loves A Woman
Founder of The Kerner Entertainment Company
Jordan Kerner is a widely acclaimed film and television producer. He is president and founder of The Kerner Entertainment Company, which is committed to high quality, value-oriented, provocative entertainment. Most recently, Kerner was engaged to develop and produce a film adaptation of Clifford the Big Red Dog. His previous films include The Smurfs, Charlotte’s Web, The Mighty Ducks, Fried Green Tomatoes, and When A Man Loves A Woman. Kerner is also a dedicated custodian of his community-- he is involved with such organizations as Planned Parenthood, RiverLA, and the Starbright Foundation.
President of RMN Grand Palais
Former Director TATE Modern
The public has started to use museums in a completely different way. When we asked at the TATE Modern, why do you want to come? People said, "We want to come to gain knowledge. People said, “We want to come to admire, but most people said, "We want to come to the museum because it's a perfect place for encounters."
I always speak not about good or bad art. I don't think that's interesting. I speak about necessary or not necessary art. I teach a lot, still do, and when I asked students, "Why do you come and study?" I was only interested in students who spoke about I want to make a contribution...I want to know what they can contribute.
Executive Director
INTUIT · The Center for Intuitive & Outsider Art
Academy Award-winning Film Editor
Star Wars · Ray · Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
I think that editing is an interpretive art. You look at the material, and then you react to it. You make decisions about what do I want to reveal at the beginning of the scene? And what do I want to save for the end? And how do I want to build to a particular impact?
Founding Managing Director of Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center 2012-2016
Co-founder of Future Library · Director of UNESCO’s Athens World Book Capital 2018-2019
Director of Greek Operations · The Heritage Management Organization
What you say is very interesting. How do we make the readers of tomorrow?Because it’s true there are many children growing up who do not have the same relationship to books that we did. And so we have to reach them with social and educational initiatives like yours. We need libraries which are social spaces.One of my children, he was not so fond of books. He likes fashion. If it relates to fashion, he will find out everything about it. And so I believe if you reach them through their interests they will understand the importance of reading.
Poet
It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.
Award-winning Author · Educator · Editor
Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, the Donna Ford Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University and Professor Emeritus, the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an award-winning author and editor of approximately 50 books. His writings have been translated into 25 languages. He is the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. One of the architects of critical pedagogy in North America, Professor McLaren is active politically in both North America and America Latina and is co-founder of Instituto McLaren de Pedagogia Critica in Ensenada, Mexico. His work is indebted to his mentor, Paulo Freire, and the Catholic social justice tradition of liberation theology. His latest book is He Walks Among Us: Christian Fascism Ushering in the End of Days.
Tony Award-winning Actor
Chicago · Dirty Rotten Scoundrels · Billy Elliot · Blue Bloods
Gregory Jbara is a Tony award-winning stage actor with a impressive career spanning over four decades . On Broadway, Gregory has stared in renditions of Chicago, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Billy Elliot, which earned him the 2009 Tony award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Since departing from the stage, Gregory has spent ten seasons alongside Tom Selick in the CBS drama Blue Bloods.
Rome Prize & Story Prize Spotlight Award-winning Author · Translator & Educator
Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House and the recent debut novel How I Became a North Korean, both published by Viking, Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and finalist for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared inGranta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea.
MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, Educator,
Curator & Author ofMarking Time - Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Dr. Nicole Fleetwood is an educator and author whose work explores Black cultural history, visual, media, and gender studies and mass incarceration. She earned her B.Phil from Miami University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She has also been published in several scholarly journals, co/curated exhibitions on art and mass incarceration, and received prestigious grants and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellowship, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and many more.
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels, amongst them A Small Hotel and Perfume River, as well as A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 2013, he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. His stories have appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, and many more. Butler's works have been translated into twenty-one languages, a few of which include Vietnamese, Serbian, Farsi, Estonian, and Chinese. He is a Krafft Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He lives in Florida with his wife, poet Kelly Lee Butler.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Xander Guidry. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
Joshua Pais has appeared in over a hundred movies and TV shows, including recurring roles in Ray Donovan, Mrs. Fletcher, The Good Wife, Maniac, The Sopranos, and Law and Order: SVU. His film work includes Motherless Brooklyn, Joker, Touchy Feely, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Music of the Heart, Assassination of a High School President, and I Saw the Light. The son of holocaust survivor and theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, Josh is the founder of Committed Impulse, a comprehensive acting technique which involves creating from the energetic (atomic) truth in the body.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Austen Juul-Hansen. Digital Media Coordinator is Hannah Story Brown.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Terry Clark with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Terry Clark. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
Jack Thorne is an internationally acclaimed playwright and BAFTA award-winning screenwriter. His adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is currently airing on HBO and the BBC, and his new series The Eddy was recently released for Netflix. Thorne’s screenwriting career began on the Channel 4 series Shameless and BBC series Skins. Later this year, his feature adaptation of The Secret Garden will be released and feature films Enola Holmes and Swimmers are on the way. Thorne’s films include The Aeronauts, starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, Wonder, starring Julia Roberts and A Long Way Down starring Toni Collette. As a playwright, Jack’s credits include the Tony and Olivier award-winning West End and Broadway hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Leni Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
Executive Director of the Design Museum of Chicago
Tanner Woodford is founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and paints large scale typographic murals across public spaces. As a designer, educator, and entrepreneur, he has taught, lectured, and led workshops on design issues, social change, and design history in classrooms and at conferences. He is happy to be scrappy, irrepressibly optimistic, and believes design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition. He lives and works in Chicago, Ill.
President & CEO · National Constitution Center · Contributing Editor of The Atlantic
Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School
The Constitution expresses the Enlightenment faith. All human beings are born with natural rights that come from God or nature and not from government, and that it's the purpose of government to allow us to exercise our freedom. It's so rich and striking to see how the great thinkers who inspired the Founders of the American Constitution, beginning with the Greek and Roman philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics, and then continued through The Enlightenment, really were philosophers of happiness. And they believe that we have a right and a duty to pursue happiness, not by feeling good, but by being good. It's a classical notion of happiness rooted in virtue and civic virtue. It's both an individual and a political obligation. The individual obligation to pursue happiness is to master our perturbations of the mind, as Cicero put it, channeling Aristotle–anger, jealousy, and fear so that we can be guided by reason rather than passion and serve others and the public good. And then constitutions are formed to allow us to do that at the political level and to be governed by reason rather than passion, to slow down deliberation so that hasty factions don't crystallize and threaten liberty and equality, and to ensure that the government protects our natural rights rather than threatening them.
The Creative Process: Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
