

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
Mia Funk
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.
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Apr 11, 2022 • 16min
Reinventing Museums - YVES WINKIN on Cultural Anthropology & Communication - Highlights
Yves Winkin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Liège and Honorary Professor at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. He proposed an "anthropology of communication" based on an ethnographic approach. He was deputy director of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, director of the French Institute of Education and director of the musée des Arts et Métiers. He is the author of several books, most recently Réinventer les musées? www.arts-et-metiers.netwww.creativeprocess.infowww.cairn.info/publications-de-Yves-Winkin--37080.htm

Apr 11, 2022 • 1h 30min
YVES WINKIN - Writer, Anthropologist, Fmr. Director of Musée des Arts et Métiers
Yves Winkin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Liège and Honorary Professor at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. He proposed an "anthropology of communication" based on an ethnographic approach. He was deputy director of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, director of the French Institute of Education and director of the musée des Arts et Métiers. He is the author of several books, most recently Réinventer les musées?www.arts-et-metiers.netwww.creativeprocess.infowww.cairn.info/publications-de-Yves-Winkin--37080.htm

Apr 10, 2022 • 11min
Light on Fire: The Art & Life of Sam Francis with GABRIELLE SELZ - Highlights
Gabrielle Selz is the author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction, published by W.W. Norton in 2014. Unstill Life received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by both the San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeleyside. She is currently writing Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis to be published by U.C Press.Selz holds a special interest in the intersection of memory, history, cultural criticism, and art. As a child, she bounced between the bohemian art worlds of New York and Berkeley, California. Her father, Peter Selz, was the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before he founded the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Her mother, Thalia Selz, was a writer and the founding editor of Story Quarterly. In 1969, Thalia selected the original tenants for Westbeth, the largest artists housing project in the country, and the family then moved to live alongside artists like Diane Arbus and Merce Cunningham. Introduced to Sam Francis as a child, her interest in his life, career and what motivated his extraordinary contributions, expanded while she was researching and writing Unstill Life.Selz has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, More Magazine, The Rumpus and the L.A. Times. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction Magazine and her art criticism in Art Papers, Hyperallergic and Newsday and the Huffington Post. She is a past recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction and is a Moth Story Slam Winner. · gabrielleselz.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Apr 10, 2022 • 1h 18min
GABRIELLE SELZ - Award-winning Author, Memoirist - "Unstill Life" "Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis"
Gabrielle Selz is the author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction, published by W.W. Norton in 2014. Unstill Life received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by both the San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeleyside. Selz holds a special interest in the intersection of memory, history, cultural criticism, and art. As a child, she bounced between the bohemian art worlds of New York and Berkeley, California. Her father, Peter Selz, was the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before he founded the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Her mother, Thalia Selz, was a writer and the founding editor of Story Quarterly. Gabrielle is currently writing Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis to be published by U.C Press. · gabrielleselz.com · www.creativeprocess.info

Apr 8, 2022 • 10min
Rethinking Sustainable Cities with DAVID SIMON - Highlights
"It's always difficult to avoid charges of being nostalgic if we talk about going back to things. Back to the past or forward to the past, but there are principles that existed in preindustrial/early industrial cities and which were overturned by key technological inventions of the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the railway, the motorcar, of course, the internal combustion engine on which it’s based and which led to the vast expansion of towns and cities and, crucially, suburbanization where people who could afford it moved out of the more polluted densely populated inner areas into low density, better lifestyle-oriented suburbs and even beyond the suburbs into surrounding rural areas and were able to commute in by fast means to their workplace in the city, but the result of that is what we now face as the challenge of unsustainability. And as you rightly say, the key feature that still characterizes many European cities today–London, Paris, Berlin, many others, is the idea that they are composed ultimately of a series of–in London they like to call them villages–neighborhoods and areas that have multiple land uses and dense social networks of interaction within a small area. That principle, what is now called by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and being popularized more widely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Network and others as the 15 or 20 Minute City or 15 or 20 Minute Neighbourhood. The idea underpinning it is that a higher proportion of the goods and services, the activities, the social interactions that we need are obtainable within a 1 1/2 to 2 km radius of one's home, which means a far higher proportion of one's individual trips or multiple purpose journeys can be done on foot and by bicycle, therefore, you use your vehicle if you have one more sparingly. You use the bus or minibusses to reach slightly more distant places, and then you have transport interchanges is where you connect with the metro system or the best rapid transit or the railway to reach other parts of large cities or indeed for inner-city journeys. And that is what is now becoming the new best practice in terms of urban planning redesign both of existing urban areas to try to revitalize inner-city areas, other areas that are depressed and in need of economic regeneration and principles on the basis of which we need to design new areas, whether they are on the outskirts of bigger cities or in the context of middle and low-income countries designing entirely new cities which are going to be built over the coming 20 or 30 years and which, in terms of the number of people who live in them and the number of hectares or square kilometers that they will cover of the earth’s surface, will be equivalent to that built between the beginning of urbanization and the present day. It's a staggering thought, but if you think about it that way, it highlights the importance of new build, new design, it hhaccording to our latest understanding of sound sustainability principles."David Simon is Professor of Development Geography and Director for External Engagement in the School of Life Sciences and the Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London. He was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, Gothenburg, Sweden from 2014–2019. A former Rhodes Scholar, he specialises in cities, climate change and sustainability, and the relationships between theory, policy and practice, on all of which he has published extensively. At Mistra Urban Futures, he led the pioneering methodological research on comparative transdisciplinary co-production. His extensive experience includes sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the UK, Sweden and USA. From 2020-21, served as a Commissioner on the international Commission on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification (CoSAI), 2020-21. His most recent books as author, ed

Apr 8, 2022 • 58min
DAVID SIMON - Editor of “Rethinking Sustainable Cities” - Professor & Director External Engagement, Royal Holloway, U of London
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography and Director for External Engagement in the School of Life Sciences and the Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London. He was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, Gothenburg, Sweden from 2014–2019. A former Rhodes Scholar, he specialises in cities, climate change and sustainability, and the relationships between theory, policy and practice, on all of which he has published extensively. At Mistra Urban Futures, he led the pioneering methodological research on comparative transdisciplinary co-production. His extensive experience includes sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the UK, Sweden and USA. From 2020-21, served as a Commissioner on the international Commission on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification (CoSAI), 2020-21. His most recent books as author, editor or co-editor are Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Accessible, green and fair (Policy Press, 2016), Urban Planet (Cambridge Univ Press, 2018), Holocaust Escapees and Global Development: Hidden histories (Zed Books, 2019), Key Thinkers on Development (2nd edn, Routledge, 2019), Comparative Urban Research from Theory to Practice: Co-production for sustainability (Policy Press, 2020), and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-production for Sustainable Cities: a Guide (Practical Action Publishing, 2021).pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/david-simon(69b08a6c-d133-4157-b1f2-eb0036b4d6e6).htmlbristoluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/global-social-challenges-journalwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Apr 5, 2022 • 7min
In the Dream House with Author CARMEN MARIA MACHADO - Highlights
“I would say that I write liminal fantasy. I write surrealist work and literary fiction. I write horror. Horror is probably the genre that speaks to me the most. I feel horror is the genre that I feel the most affinity towards. For me, that is the sweet spot where the beautiful and the grotesque meet each other. It's very interesting to me, and I think encouraging people to look at certain ideas that are horrifying, making them beautiful and interesting, that intersection of beauty and pain, humor and darkness, it’s the most interesting place.”Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."· carmenmariamachado.com · www.creativeprocess.info · www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Apr 5, 2022 • 29min
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO - Lambda Literary Award Winning Author of In the Dream House - Her Body and Other Parties
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."· carmenmariamachado.com · www.creativeprocess.info · www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Apr 4, 2022 • 1min
From Criminal Minds to Glengarry Glen Ross - JOE MANTEGNA on Acting & Directing - Highlights
Actor, producer, writer and director, Joe Mantegna began his career on the stage with the 1969 musical Hair. He later earned a Tony Award for portraying Richard Roma in the first American production of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross, the first of many collaborations with Mamet.Mantegna has appeared in Three Amigos, The Godfather Part III, Forget Paris, and Up Close & Personal and other films. From 2007 to 2020 he starred in the CBS TV series Criminal Minds as FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi. Since 1991, he’s had a recurring role on The Simpsons as mob boss Fat Tony. He earned Emmy Award nominations three miniseries: The Last Don, The Rat Pack, and The Starter Wife. He’s executive produced for various films and TV movies, including Corduroy, Hoods, and Lakeboat, which he also directed.

Apr 4, 2022 • 56min
JOE MANTEGNA - Tony, Emmy Award-winning Actor, Producer, Writer, Director
Actor, producer, writer and director, Joe Mantegna began his career on the stage with the 1969 musical Hair. He later earned a Tony Award for portraying Richard Roma in the first American production of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross, the first of many collaborations with Mamet.Mantegna has appeared in Three Amigos, The Godfather Part III, Forget Paris, and Up Close & Personal and other films. From 2007 to 2020 he starred in the CBS TV series Criminal Minds as FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi. Since 1991, he’s had a recurring role on The Simpsons as mob boss Fat Tony. He earned Emmy Award nominations three miniseries: The Last Don, The Rat Pack, and The Starter Wife. He’s executive produced for various films and TV movies, including Corduroy, Hoods, and Lakeboat, which he also directed.www.joemantegna.com · www.creativeprocess.info