Shelley Berc is the director of the Creativity Workshop, which uses creative writing, drawing, storytelling and personal memoir to access our innate creativity. It is a program dedicated to nurturing the creative spirit in us all. She believes that if we don't express our creative selves then destruction sets in, both individually and in societies. Berc was a Professor of the International Writing Program and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1985 to 2000. She is a novelist and playwright, writing on the female hero and her mythic journey.
Her numerous awards include the prestigious two year Pew/TCG National Theatre Artists Residency for $100,000, two Lila Wallace/Readers Digest awards, TCG Artists Residency travel grant, McKnight Fellowship, National Jewish Culture Playwriting award, Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, NEA Opera/Music librettist fellowship, and an Outer Critics Circle nomination for best off-Broadway play. Her plays and adaptations of the classics and symphony and dance texts have been performed in such venues as the American Repertory Theatre, Yale Rep, CSC, Portland Stage, ACT-San Francisco, Seattle Rep, The Walker Arts Center, Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, Chicago Symphony, Festival d'Avignon and the Edinburgh Festival.
Berc’s novels also deal with the age old mythologies of human existence. They include The Shape of Wilderness, published by Coffee House Press, A Girl's Guide to the Divine Comedy (Johns Hopkins Press), and Light and Its Shadow (Ethos Books, upcoming 2008).
She was one of the first female BA graduates of Amherst College and she received her MFA from Yale School of Drama. She lives in New York City with her husband and co-director of the Creativity Workshop, Alejandro Fogel.
Recent Stories
Time to nourish your creativity
Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007
We are all born creative, it is a fact of human nature. Anyone who has watched a child absorbed in her make-believe world can see that. But the curiosity and imagination so evident in our child selves often fades with the passage of time.