The Creativity Workshop is based in New York City and is taught around the world.
It was established in 1993 by educator and writer Shelley Berc and educator and multimedia artist Alejandro Fogel. The organization is dedicated to teaching individuals and groups about their creative processes.
Faculty
- Shelley Berc, Director, Faculty
- Alejandro Fogel, Director, Faculty
Shelley Berc
Shelley Berc has been teaching people in all disciplines how to access, nurture, and expand their creativity for over 20 years. She believes that creativity is a common denominator of humanity and she is passionate about educating individuals and organizations about how to develop this uniquely human gift.
Berc emphasizes that many of the creative thinking processes that a scientist, a CEO, and an artist go through are extremely similar, even though the outcomes are as different as can be.
Berc was a full professor at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop from 1985-2000.
She is a well known author of novels and plays. Her novel, The Shape of Wilderness, was praised by The New York Times as “a vividly imagined parable…a strange and potent book”. Her numerous awards include a McKnight Fellowship, two Lila Wallace/Readers Digest awards, Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, a Pew/ TCG National Theatre Artists Residency, and an NEA Opera/Music librettist fellowship.
Shelley Berc’s theatre pieces have starred many notable actors, such as Patrick Stewart, Stanley Tucci, and Tony Shalhoub. Her plays have been performed at the American Repertory Theatre, the Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, and Classic Stage Company among others.
She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and was one of the first women to graduate from Amherst College.
Alejandro Fogel
Alejandro Fogel was born in Buenos Aires. He has been teaching individuals of all backgrounds about how to increase their creativity, innovative thinking and perception for over 25 years. He has demonstrated to his students that they all have artistic abilities and that those abilities are also very useful in many non-artistic fields.
Fogel’s work has taken the form of writing, paintings, installations, prints, videos, photographs and travel performances transforming mundane objects and materials into treasured possessions. Much of his work is stored in sealed boxes waiting to be deteriorated by time and obsolete technologies. As the stories he tells are consumed by the passage of time, often losing relevance and disappearing, his material analog art works are also fading and becoming only memories.
Coaching Che Guevara, his most recent book, explores the overlappings of time and place, philosophy, and physics, politics and peoples in the throes of war and migration. Alejandro Fogel has received numerous awards and honors and exhibited his work around the world. He was an artist-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy. He received the Rolex Award for Enterprise to publish his project, The Incas Road. Alejandro Fogel’s surviving works are currently disappearing in museums and private collections worldwide.
He studied at the University of Buenos Aires and has an MFA in Multimedia from the University of Iowa.
