Who We Are

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
Patricia Foster, Faculty
Kirpal Singh, Faculty



Shelley Berc

Shelley Berc was a Professor at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Playwrights Workshop MFA Program from 1985-2000. She 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.

In 2000, she left academia to dedicate herself wholly to the Creativity Workshop, which she founded in 1993 with Alejandro Fogel when they were cultural ambassadors for the United States Information Agency.

As well as being a prominent educator, Shelley Berc is a well known author of novels and plays. Her novel, The Shape of Wilderness, was published by Coffee House Press. The New York Times praised it as "a vividly imagined parable...a strange and potent book...a fantastical world of unusual sensuality and invention". Her second novel, Light and Its Shadow, was published by Ethos Press last spring. Her numerous awards include a McKnight Fellowship, two Lila Wallace/Readers Digest awards, Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, National Jewish Culture Playwriting award, the prestigious two year Pew/TCG National Theatre Artists Residency, an NEA Opera/Music librettist fellowship, and an Outer Critics Circle nomination for best off-Broadway play.

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. Berc was Professor of the International Writing Program and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1985-2000. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and was one of the first women to graduate from Amherst College.

 

Alejandro Fogel

Born and raised in Argentina, Fogel is deeply involved in bringing to light the history of Pre-Columbian cultures and their tragic plight.

Since 1995 he has been creating art works and a book of writings that follow the footsteps of his own life in 1960s and 70s Argentina (under Peronism, the Dirty War, and the Return to Democracy) and how they intersect and diverge from his father's journey to South America from war-torn Europe.

Alejandro Fogel has received numerous awards and honors. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, where he studied and wrote about the descendants of the Incas now living in Argentina. He was also an artist-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. He was selected by The Rolex Award for Enterprise in Geneva, Switzerland, which included the publication of his project The Inka's Road.

His awards are numerous; they include the Arche Biennal Award in Painting, the National Endowment for the Arts of Argentina First Prize in Painting, The Pio Collivadino Award of the Argentine National Gallery of Art, and the Richard Wagner International Association Award in Painting. Alejandro Fogel worked with the Argentine Commission of Visual Arts helping to develop a native folk artists archive.

 

Additional Faculty

Patricia Foster

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (memoir), Just Beneath My Skin (personal essays; starred review from Kirkus Reviews) and the editor of Minding the Body and Sister to Sister. She won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Hoepfner Award, and the Dean's Scholar Award for nonfiction, received a Florida Arts Council Award, the Lake Effect Fiction Award, and a Yaddo Fellowship for fiction as well as four Alabama Arts & Humanities grants.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Vogue, Chronicle for Higher Education, Glamour, Ploughshares as well as other newspapers and journals.

She's published both nonfiction and fiction in the Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train and other quarterlies. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and her Ph.D. from Florida State University. She is a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa and has been an exchange professor in France.

 

Kirpal Singh

Professor Kirpal Singh is recognized internationally as an expert in the field of creativity development and is a frequent a keynoter speaker at conferences and seminars on Creativity & Innovation.

He is the founding Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at the Singapore Management University, where he is a professor and teaches courses in creative thinking. Dr. Singh's latest book, "Thinking Hats & Colored Turbans" (Prentice-Hall, 2004), deals with the exploration of creativity in business, art, science, and life. He has been a consultant in innovation to several large corporations (such as AMEX, IBM, Singapore Airlines, L'Oreal).

Singh is also a fiction writer and poet. This year he is a visiting writer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching poetry. He is the author of 15 books and more than 40 journal articles. Singh, a recipient of numerous writing awards, has given readings of his work at Literature & Arts Festivals all over the world, including The Edinburgh, Cambridge, York, Adelaide, Toronto, and Sydney Festivals.

He has lectured and served as a writer-in-residence at universities in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, UK, USA, India, Philippines, Mexico, Germany, Italy, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Hungary. In 1997 he was Distinguished International Writer at the world-famous University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2005 Professor Singh became the first non-American to be appointed to the American Creativity Association’s Board.