Art and Theater Director, Costume Designer

Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator.

Composer

I can't draw a line between language, really, and music. It's too disparate, but there are so many levels of human communication in it that I hear. Feelings, obviously, imagery, a sort of indescribable warmth, chills. All of these kinds of words we try to use to explain the feelings, but the communication is very clear when music is good. It's very clear. You hear a story that is a four-dimensional story.

Chef, Author and Restauranteur

Playwright and Director

I think the big thing writing for the theater has given me is the awareness that it's possible to inhabit another person's subjectivity fully enough to give voice to a set of experiences that aren't your own and you can do that in a way that gives solace and interests people. We're all capable of those kinds of acts of imagination that can bring us closer to the subjectivity of other people.

Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA

Da Vinci certainly must have been very well organized because you can't make so much work without a base in the organization of your life which is very strict. You can't go and penetrate such high intellectual spheres unless you're a man of good. Do you understand what I mean? To have some ideal of perfection, beauty, and humanity inside yourself…Art is art, and that's all. To me, art is the expression of beauty, and beauty is something like the sun, shall we say. An absolute.

Writer

Art was important to me as a youth: I looked at paintings, listened to music and I read a lot. I assumed I would become an artist of some sort, and thought perhaps I would be a painter.

Writer

I come in on a story when things are different, destabilized, when, in effect, a new voice may be necessary, whether from the outside narrator or from within the story, inhabiting the mind of my character.

Director General · Cité Internationale des Arts

Director of the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven
Chair in Asteroseismology at Radboud University Nijmegen

Everybody is interested in the Universe, so communicating about it is easy, no matter the background of the audience. These pictures of planets, comets, stars, galaxies, etc., trigger so much imagination that one gets the attention and interest immediately. The beauty of our Cosmos moves all.

Musician and Songwriter

So, I started the program called Shelter Songs. I'm in two shelters now and expanding to 4 or 5 throughout the city. It's a nice thing to just look at them and say, "I'm with you for an hour. I'm here to serve you. Whatever you want. I have no agenda on what we're going to write.

President · Costume Designers Guild
The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect trilogy, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Veronica Mars

Whether you're telling a story for the people at work or you're telling a story for your character on camera, I think that we tell a story every day by what we wear.

Artist and activist for people, places, and animals

I was in a group called the Women's Action Coalition in the early 90's. The fact that we couldn't get the ERA passed is insane. Although, now as I’m seeing it reintroduced, it should be a true equal rights amendment for everybody. Not just focused on women being equal to men, but a real update to the constitution. We still have things that we need to rewrite.

Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints
The Morgan Library & Museum

So that idea of what the drawings tell us about the artist is another thing that's constantly interesting to me. You, maybe more so than a finished painting, get a sense of what problems an artist is trying to work out along the way.

Artistic Director · John Drew Theater · Guild Hall of East Hampton

And the era of the actor-manager has probably passed, but in a curious way, I feel like I've been living that life as an actor-manager because I will both act, direct or produce and they all inform each other. You know, they're all part of the same creative language. And I think, having been an actor and first and foremost loving being an actor, I think I know how to speak and communicate with other actors at various levels.

Highlights of recent interviews and engagements with museums and creative communities

“Sometimes we think that we invented everything, but this is not true. The history of human thinking is very important, is very useful for us to know different thinking of other people… There are different approaches in life and different interpretations of the world and of societies.”

Musician and Songwriter

There is a metaphor to every single word that we say, we're just not aware. But if we were aware, then it would become very interesting. And that's the quest for me to be constantly more and more aware because it's so beautiful. It's a quest for beauty as well.

Writer

As seductive as the virtual world can be – where there are fewer boundaries, where you can be anything, and you can be anyone – there's something very important about the tactile world and being grounded in the tactile world. And so far humanity has not lost sight of that collectively. And I do not think that we will.

Writer · Producer · Director
Sex and the City, Modern Family, Everybody Loves Raymond, Otherhood

It was a long journey because I think I've been writing television now twenty-five years. I never really had the directing bug. I always loved writing and I like being behind the scenes and, in television, writers have so much control anyway to rise up the ranks and run the show and hire the directors, so I mostly had just great collaborations with directors.

Pilobolus Dance Company

I guess the part that's our thing is the method or process that Renée Jaworski was describing. The constraint, the framework that we try to put on what we're doing includes that, for this time, let's not map everything out first and try and realize the vision that one person has but to put people together, as Renée was saying, and have something else emerge that's a product of everybody that's involved. Penn Jillette, who we were honored to work with, the way he put it is, "You're not a collective, you're not looking the same, talking the same, you don't use the same terms for movement. All the dancers look different, and they think differently as well. –MATT KENT

Director · Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

Jackson Pollock said it himself. “It's energy and motion made visible.” So these are things that come spontaneously from his own feelings, but they're based on, first of all, observation, the natural world around him, all the forces of nature that were so influential. And then, processing that and figuring out how to create a visual language that expresses those feelings. And some of those feelings can be very complicated.

The technique, the means of expression is dictated by what those feelings are. It's not the other way around. People think – Oh, he used the liquid material and then he sort of danced around and that kind of gave him ideas. – No.

Actor and Director

When I read Mamet, to me, it was almost like–Yeah! I get it. This is a language I understand. It felt very comfortable to me. And I know he has told me that he has written characters with my voice in his mind as he wrote them, and so, again how lucky for me that that's the case. I feel very lucky that it's worked out that way that he's the writer that I ended up hooking up with.

Academy Award-winning Documentary Filmmaker

I think it's interesting because I feel like in scripted films people are trying to infuse a spontaneity and a reality and a being in the moment into something that's very artificial. And I feel a lot of what we do as documentarians is try and impose a structure or a form on something that is utterly real and alive and in the moment and uncategorizable in many ways. So, we're kind of the opposite, coming from opposite ends of the same goal, which is to kind of create something that is or feels authentic to a certain truth, an emotional truth, or a literal truth.

Cinematographer

If I had to choose one movie I always say Terrence Mallick's Badlands. If I have to ever choose one it's that one. It's just such an amazing film. Great music and great acting. Just sort of stood back, relaxed cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. That era of John Cassavetes movies. Oh, my god, Gloria, Woman Under the Influence. Just outstanding and daring and free. In the film world, I’m probably more influenced by that than I even realize. I always appreciated the magic of cinema, even before I was involved.

President of the Acropolis Museum

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is.

Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

Associate Curator
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

The connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep. And it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the oppressor. It's much more complicated than that.

Actress, Choreographer, Artistic Director - Neo-Political Cowgirls

I care very deeply about the arts, theater arts. So I had a choice to make, either leave entirely or be the change, as they say. So I started Neo-Political Cowgirls to embrace women in their story, in our story.

Director of FIAC · Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain

If you create the conditions in which people feel comfortable interacting with art, there are some really beautiful things that can emerge from that encounter. Things that I think are life changing.

Playwright & President of the Dramatists Guild of America

I think we have to look to find the voices of women and marginalized people because sometimes it's the most disenfranchised people in the culture that are the most articulate about it and most aware of the innate injustice in certain social systems. So I think we really have examine our canon and broaden and deepen it to include more voices.

Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

Pianist and TV/Film Composer

I think the music, the way that it's shot, and the way that it's written, of course, all work in conjunction. There’s something about a passage of time in your mind. Then it's not about the clocks. It's more about the suspended, almost like the absence of clocks, and the idea of suspended time, which memory is more like that since in our memory all time happens at once.

Writer · Critic · Artist
it is wonderful to have more than one culture, as you know. It's a great thing in life. It's a wonderful thing in life.

If you know other languages, it's stupendous because it gives you some access, both in reading and fluidity of places, but also to know that you can have two exciting places to be in. Two exciting languages and two exciting cultures and two exciting places to visit. That's what I love, mostly. I don't think I was born in the wrong country. I wasn't really born in America. I was born in the Bronx.

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences · KU Leuven

The humanities study people, their cultures, and their arts. The disciplines provide us with frameworks of meaning to understand our place in the world and in human history. They teach us how to read literature, history, religions, music, and works of visual art among many others. All of these are important aspects of what it means to be part of the global collective of humankind.

I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the Enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

Novelist · Feminist · Philanthropist

I was born in 1942 in a Catholic, conservative, patriarchal society. And I was born angry against the world as I saw it. I became a feminist before the word reached Chile. I was a young girl when I realized I didn’t want to be like my mother, although I adored her, I wanted to be like my grandfather and the men in our family: strong, independent, self-sufficient, unafraid. Later I learned that some women could be all that and decided I was going to be one of them. Since then I have worked with women and for women all my life. I have a foundation whose mission is to empower women and girls. I don’t need to invent my feminine characters, the women I have known inspire me.