
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
Exploring the fascinating minds of creative people. Conversations with writers, artists and creative thinkers across the Arts and STEM. We discuss their life, work and artistic practice. Winners of Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Pulitzer, Nobel Prize, leaders and public figures share real experiences and offer valuable insights. Notable guests and participating museums and organizations include: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Neil Patrick Harris, Smithsonian, Roxane Gay, Musée Picasso, EARTHDAY-ORG, Neil Gaiman, UNESCO, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Seliger, Acropolis Museum, Hilary Mantel, Songwriters Hall of Fame, George Saunders, The New Museum, Lemony Snicket, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, Joe Mantegna, PETA, Greenpeace, EPA, Morgan Library and Museum, and many others.
The interviews are hosted by founder and creative educator Mia Funk with the participation of students, universities, and collaborators from around the world. These conversations are also part of our traveling exhibition.
Latest episodes

Jun 5, 2023 • 19min
Special World Environment Day Stories - Environmentalists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast or reflectors of our participating students.Voices on this episode areBRITT WRAY Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, StanfordJEFFREY SACHS President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia UniversityEVELINE MOL, Student Barnard CollegeBERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse FoundationAVA CLANCY, StudentMIRA PATLA, StudentDARA DIAMOND, StudentARIELLE DAVIS, StudentCLAIRE POTTER, Designer, Lecturer, Author of Welcome to the Circular EconomyMEGAN HEGENBARTH, Participating Student, University of MinnesotaGRACE PHILLIPS, Participating Student, Pitzer CollegeBIANCA WEBER, Participating Student, Syracuse UniversityELLEN EFSTATHIOU, Participating Student, Oberlin CollegeSURYA VIR, Participating Student, University of Wisconsin-MadisonMACIE PARKER, Participating Student, Boston UniversityBEILA UNGAR, Participating Student, Columbia UniversityCARL SAFINA, Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center, Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace”Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Jun 5, 2023 • 3min
Happy World Environment Day! Voices from the Parkinson's Community & Artpark Bridges Celebrate the Natural World
The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast wishes listeners Happy World Environment Day. For this special episode we celebrate the natural world with Artpark Bridges, the Parkinson's Community, independent living adults with Parkinson's disease, and People Inc, the Arts Experience, a day habilitation program for adults with developmental disabilities. Artpark Bridges is a year-round community engagement program led by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Pegado, dedicated to empowering adults of diverse abilities and backgrounds through expressive arts workshops and performance opportunities. Serving the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region of New York State, Artpark Bridges connects citizens with a sense of inclusion and purpose, healing and creative expression. Cynthia Pegado Teaching artist and movement expert, Cynthia Cadwell Pegado, weaves her passion for immersive performance into the creative process of site-specific work for people of all abilities. Ms. Pegado is an eight-time New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Community Arts awardee, for “Art Moves Me”, her interpretive dance program based on visual art, designed for the Burchfield Penney Art Center and "Sound Dance" designed for Artpark. She has choreographed performance works for students in Parkinson’s specific classes as well as public programs which include Global Water Dances (a worldwide network of choreographers advocating for water quality)Muriel Louveau French vocalist composer Muriel Louveau has been invited by Sonia Kozlova Clark ,director of Artpark festival, as an international artist in residence at Artpark in 2022 to create and customize virtual expressive voice classes facilitated by Cynthia for Artpark Bridges groups including the Parkinson's and People Inc communities. This ongoing program of classes focuses on vocalizing skills and communal art-making with a theme of universal humanity."For me it is an artistic exchange but foremost a human experience. I cannot describe in words how this collaboration with the Artpark Bridges community inspires me, touches me, and opens my heart." Muriel Louveau, Artpark Bridges Sound Moves Me Artist-in-Residence.These recorded pieces have been developed with their students during "Our Garden " vocal workshop Poem "'Lily" written and read by Nancy (People Inc), "Nature" by Ed (PD group), "Fragile Beauty" by Nancy and Cynthia, "Garden of Love" by Cammie (People Inc).www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastFlower Duet - Leo DelibesCreative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Conducted by Philip Milman https://pmmusic.pro/

Jun 4, 2023 • 5min
CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace."So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy.The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being."www.safinacenter.orgwww.carlsafina.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.infoIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto: Carl Safina in Uganda

Jun 3, 2023 • 17min
ANTHONY JOSEPH - T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music.As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. “Calling England Home” and “Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)” were released in 2021 by Anthony Joseph and appear on his album "The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives”. www.anthonyjoseph.co.ukhttps://open.spotify.com/artist/622cbugSJevUkEanSBCab9www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Jun 3, 2023 • 4min
ROBERT PLANT - DICKIE LANDRY - LIL' BAND O' GOLD
Robert Plant is a singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he’s known for his flamboyant persona and raw stage performances. He’s also collaborated outside of the rock genre. Here he performs with Lil' Band O' Gold. For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Philip Glass, Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass’ ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11.http://www.dickielandry.comhttps://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landrywww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast

Jun 2, 2023 • 11min
The Art of Reading Minds with Mentalist - HENRIK FEXEUS - Highlights
“A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works?So that was one part of it. I always longed for there to be something else. And I think one of the reasons for that was because I was quite the socially awkward child. I didn't have the skill set to interact in a frictionless way with my classmates, which meant that I was a weird guy. I was the one who got beaten up every single day at school, but I was also quite extroverted. So I didn't confine myself to my place in the corner. I was still there every Friday because on Fridays there was an open hour in class where you can perform or just show something. And I was always there to do magic because I had a skill. I could do something that the other guys couldn't. And then they beat me up again for it. But I do think that that realization that there's something going on here, that sort of set off something in my mind that this is something I needed to solve. I wanted to understand my bullies. This wasn't a conscious reflection on my part, but it was there. It basically felt like everyone else had been handed a handbook on social intelligence.”Henrik Fexeus is an internationally bestselling author, lecturer, performer, and star of the TV show Mind Melt. An expert in psychology and communications, he travels the world "reading minds" and teaching others how to understand and manipulate human behavior through body language and persuasion. Henrik has studied mental skills like NLP, hypnosis, acting, and magic.https://henrikfexeus.se/en/www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Jun 2, 2023 • 1h 4min
HENRIK FEXEUS - Mentalist, Author & TV Host “The Art of Reading Minds”,“Mind Melt”,“Cult”
Henrik Fexeus is an internationally bestselling author, lecturer, performer, and star of the TV show Mind Melt. An expert in psychology and communications, he travels the world "reading minds" and teaching others how to understand and manipulate human behavior through body language and persuasion. Henrik has studied mental skills like NLP, hypnosis, acting, and magic.“A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works?So that was one part of it. I always longed for there to be something else. And I think one of the reasons for that was because I was quite the socially awkward child. I didn't have the skill set to interact in a frictionless way with my classmates, which meant that I was a weird guy. I was the one who got beaten up every single day at school, but I was also quite extroverted. So I didn't confine myself to my place in the corner. I was still there every Friday because on Fridays there was an open hour in class where you can perform or just show something. And I was always there to do magic because I had a skill. I could do something that the other guys couldn't. And then they beat me up again for it. But I do think that that realization that there's something going on here, that sort of set off something in my mind that this is something I needed to solve. I wanted to understand my bullies. This wasn't a conscious reflection on my part, but it was there. It basically felt like everyone else had been handed a handbook on social intelligence.”https://henrikfexeus.se/en/www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Jun 1, 2023 • 34min
PABLO HOFFMAN - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Exec. Director & Co-Founder of Sociedade Chauá
Pablo Hoffman has always been passionate about plants and natural ecosystems, with special appreciation for research and dissemination with practical results for the production and conservation of native species. Pablo graduated in Forestry at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) 2002, had his Master’s in Forestry – UFPR 2014, currently he is a PhD candidate in Forestry. One of the Founders of the Sociedade Chauá, Pablo has been a board member since 2008. Currently is the Executive Director as well Coordinator of the Chauá Nursery of native species. A specialist in conservation, propagation and restoration of rare and endangered species of the Araucaria Forest, whose projects are locally and internationally recognized. As a result of Sociedade’s Chauá efforts to save endangered plant species Pablo was awarded the Marsh Award (2018), Whitley Award (2022), and Guardians of Nature (2022). As a life choice, working with conservation of rare and endangered plant species is the lifeblood of his personal and professional aspirations, to leave a positive legacy for the next generations, keeping the ecosystems alive with humans as part of it."Most of my family are cowboys and farmers. And I was like eight or nine years old. My grandmother was getting sick, and she always had a lot of plants at home in pots, and she asked me to help her to water the plants. And it was quite a good experience because when you start to like plants, it becomes like a viral thing. After some time I was growing my own plants, and I was very interested in doing her garden. And I would go to the forest and collect plants to grow at home like orchids that were beginning my first nursery.And it's a crazy love that grows when you start to understand how plants grow, and how the ecosystem functions. And how beautiful and amazing all this is. And we as humans are part of it, and I've always loved animals as well, but plants are my passion. And, of course, my, daughter's name is Flora. My wife, she's also a botanist, and she loves plants as well. So we live in the countryside where the farm has all kinds of plants. And I think one of the things that made me love and try to preserve and conserve the ecosystems and species is when you understand how slowly a plant or tree grows, and how much it takes to keep them healthy. And the interactions between the animals and plants, the pollinators and the dispersers within the ecosystem, it's something that everybody should know and see.Not scientifically, but understand in terms of just how beautiful these natural interactions really are. And we as humans are a part of it. We can have good interactions, or we can have bad interactions in terms of destroying ecosystems. Understanding we are a part of the ecosystem is an important part to keep in mind."www.sociedadechaua.orgwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

May 31, 2023 • 7min
ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Author of The Hurting Kind - The Carrying - Highlights
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 in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022.Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt www.adalimon.netwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

May 30, 2023 • 4min
NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner “The Sandman”, “American Gods”, “Good Omens”, “Coraline”
Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”. To hear our full interview with Neil Gaiman, visit The Creative Process Podcast: Arts, Culture & Society.www.neilgaiman.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm0301274/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast