UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:
Experience, Observation, Imagination
A Creative Practices Workshop Series
TBA
Online courses coming in 2025, including
Tools of Creativity
Preparation & Clearing the Way
Transcendental Practices
Endless Poetry
For all creatives, creatively blocked, or those seeking a deeper/more consistent creative practice, these hour and a half sessions will set us in motion. The three keys to maximum creativity reside in our ability to work with our own experiences, be keen observers of the world around us (and the worlds inside of us), and to engage our imaginations to describe further possibilities. This course will provide tools for doing all three, and while creativity can seem reliant on inspiration, that’s only half the equation. We have to clear the way and be ready and practiced to make good use of it. With a mix of in-class instruction, prompts, and assignments, as well out-of-class assignments, each session builds on the previous session to encourage us through a month of inspired activation.
March 1 – Tools of Creativity
We will introduce the series with an array of tools and techniques to unstick/kickstart our creative practice. We’ll explore tried and true, original, and a few more widely used techniques that we can rely on to keep us in a state of enabled inspiration. This sets us on course with techniques we will use throughout.
March 8 – Preparation & Clearing the Way
This session dives deeper into psychological creative practices that can be both tools for generating ideas as well as methods for clearing the way to creativity. We’ll explore exercises that help us focus on our own stories and concerns, to unpack and work with them, and to continually inspect and keep the creative flow free and uncluttered.
March 15 – Transcendental Practices
This session focuses on tapping into our own deep wellsprings of original ideas, thoughts, and images. We’ll explore different types of meditative practices that dial us into our unconscious processes and bring them into conscious practice. Dreams, trance, meditation, active imagining, and more will be discussed.
March 22 - Endless Poetry
This session is a culmination of our time together and a chance to dive deeper into certain aspects of our generative processes. If the previous session were about clearing the way, tapping in, and collecting ideas, this session is really about putting them into motion and how to have a self-sustaining, replenishing, and consistent creative life.
*NOTE: The course is solely devoted to creative practices. This is not an immersive theater workshop, though immersive theater will be a reference point along with music, poetry, dance, art, film, and much more.
METHODOLOGY
Tom’s workshops, classes, and higher education curricula are accessible to all persons, abilities, and backgrounds. His multimedia approach leans into immersive and site-specific modalities that center experience design. Combining material culture and audience-centered narratives, mixed-media projects that employ theater, art, choreography, and poetry as well as ceremony, artifact, and mythos, his lesson plans are all about crafting interactive experiences and puts students at the center of their own creative practices.
Tom’s courses emphasize originality and explore methods that support immersive ideation as well as other participant-centered endeavors. His workshops concentrate on different aspects of the creative process and how to build and sustain a practice that not only nurtures and causes us to thrive in our generative work but also helps us plan for creativity, hold space for it, and center it in our daily lives.
ENGAGEMENTS
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY
Tom has held a number of residency positions and taught at universities throughout the world. He also teaches in-house workshops through Third Rail Projects, and participates in panels, lectures, and academic visits, as well as shorter-term residencies.
Educational residency highlights include: Olin College of Engineering, Creative In Reference (2019-2020); Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, Creative Campus Fellow (2018—2019); Florida State University, FSU in NYC Adjunct Faculty (2009—2013); Florida School of the Arts Adjunct Faculty & Visiting Artist (1999 & 2006); La Guardia High School for the Performing Arts, through New York City Opera Arts in Education Program (2004-2005).