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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 been honored with two Emmys, for Playing for Time and Warm Springs.  Alexander was a Trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society, a board member of the American Bird Conservancy, the American Birding Association, and a Commissioner of New York State Parks. She sits on the board of the National Audubon Society, the Global Advisory Group of Bird Life International, and the Conservation Council of Panthera. In 2012 the Indianapolis Prize inaugurated the Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award, with Alexander as its first recipient.· www.creativeprocess.info

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 been honored with two Emmys, for Playing for Time and Warm Springs.  Alexander was a Trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society, a board member of the American Bird Conservancy, the American Birding Association, and a Commissioner of New York State Parks. She sits on the board of the National Audubon Society, the Global Advisory Group of Bird Life International, and the Conservation Council of Panthera. In 2012 the Indianapolis Prize inaugurated the Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award, with Alexander as its first recipient.· www.creativeprocess.info

Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and six genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. A collection of essays from the last twenty years entitled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition was published in the US in April 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His most recent book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.www.creativeprocess.info

Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and six genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. A collection of essays from the last twenty years entitled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition was published in the US in April 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His most recent book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.www.creativeprocess.info

"I went up to Bennington, to the writing seminars, with my husband to give a talk. And while I was giving the talk, I sat in on some of the graduate lectures that the writing seminars MFA candidates have to do. And I got in the car to drive home, and I said to my husband, “I want to grad school. I want to go there.” And I had already published two books at that point. I really, there was no logical reason I would be going to grad school, but I had always sort of thought that there was something that I would be more comfortable with if I went through a grad program. So six months after I gave that talk, I was in the next class at the writing seminars. And it’s a low residency program, so you develop a reading program with your mentor and you exchange fiction and annotations on the books that you’re reading, all semester long, for six months. And so in the very first meeting that I had with this writer named Rachel Paston, she said, “What is it that you’re interested in learning?” And I said, “I really want to write about domestic things, but with a twist, with some kind of magic in them.” And she said, “Have you ever read Shirley Jackson?”"Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.· www.susanscarfmerrell.com· www.creativeprocess.info

“Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.”Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts and elaborate structures leave evidence of the intimate dedication the artist has with her work. Claudia fills her art with a quality of mystical curiosity that mirrors her personal fascination with Energy, Consciousness and Nature - ultimately transforming her art into a celebration of Life and Creation.· www.claudiabueno.com · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.orgInstagram @ClaudiaBuenoArtPhoto credit: Laurent Velazquez, "Pulse" Meow Wolf Las Vegas

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine. www.creativeprocess.info

Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts and elaborate structures leave evidence of the intimate dedication the artist has with her work. Claudia fills her art with a quality of mystical curiosity that mirrors her personal fascination with Energy, Consciousness and Nature - ultimately transforming her art into a celebration of Life and Creation.· www.claudiabueno.com · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.orgInstagram @ClaudiaBuenoArtPhoto credit: Morris Weintraub

“There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognised is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.”Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests.He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere. Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.· english.princeton.edu/people/rob-nixon· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info 

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests.He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere. Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.· english.princeton.edu/people/rob-nixon· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info