EMERGENT EXPRESSION(S):

Roots, soil, & Leaves Workshop SERIES

May 17 / May 31 /June 7

12:00 ET - 1:30 ET

The Emergent Expression(s) Workshop Series will support you in tending to the roots, soil, and leaves, of your creative self.

Whether you are a professional or beginner, together we will cultivate a personal and professional practice of opening, surrendering, listening to, and showing up for, what is trying to emerge through each one of us. Sometimes we need each other to find out.

We are prying our fingers and energy away from the doom-scroll of the crumbling old and into the healing of self and imagining of a new world emerging. Whether the world is ending or just shapeshifting, we want to create! Come get inspired, challenged, accountable, and delighted in creative community. It is time to bring the beauty.

“Creating a structured time for myself in a facilitated space that requires I block out the world to focus on my inner world feels crucial.”

- Past Emergent Expression(s) Participant

“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”

- Octavia Butler

M E E T Y O U R G U I D E S

Designed in the Dot Connector “Fun With Futures” collaboratory with Sinclair Futures, sparked by collaborations with the Guild of Future Architects, these workshops will provide writers and creatives an opportunity for personal transformation and creative expression. We are writers, photographers, filmmakers, futurists, transformational coaches,and award-winning storytellers, who create across disciplines and welcome whatever flavor of creation you bring.

Bristol Baughan

  • Bristol Baughan is a Future Architect, TED Fellow, Emmy-winning and Oscar-Nominated film producer, and founded Inner Astronauts to help facilitate the shift from ego to ecological consciousness. She works 1:1 and in groups to support people in the shift from extractive to regenerative ways of being and creating through inner transformation and storytelling. She has worked with leaders in how to redefine success and express their gifts across media, marketing, advertising, health, technology, entrepreneurship, and entertainment, for over a decade.

    Bristol started her career at GOOD producing Emmy winning and Oscar-nominated films for HBO, Paramount, and Showtime. She holds a B.A. in International Studies from the American University School of International Service and an M.A. in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica and now teaches workshops at the Esalen Institute, TED Conferences, and 1440 Multiversity. Bristol is now in the Azores, Portugal weaving regenerative community with her mother Jennifer.

Robert Sinclair

  • A graduate of LACHSA and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Robert Earl Sinclair is an artist, futurist and world-builder tinkering, building and designing at the crossroads of art, culture and technology with a dedication to beauty, justice and inclusive imagination.

    In his current practice, Robert teaches at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and is a Founding member of the Guild of Future Architect’s signature offering, the Futurist Writers’ Room (FWR). Robert has created a bespoke framework for world building that hones in on culture, mitigates blind spots, and will help create aspirational narrative structures beyond our current patriarchal and colonialist quagmires.

    He has created original content, designed and facilitated live world building workshops and content for The Future Imagination Summit at NYU, Google Creative Lab, Sundance Film Festival 2020, New York Live Arts, The Doris Duke Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Africa Center, PopShift, Pop Culture Collaborative, Unfinished Live, Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler which premiered at Sundance 2021. He served as writer and head world-builder for the Imagine/IMAX upcoming film Mars 2080 and currently serves as co-creator and showrunner of For Freedoms News.

Evan Walsh

  • Evan Walsh is a photographer, writer, curator, facilitator, and producer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Coming out of Emerson College’s interdisciplinary Creative Nonfiction Media and Post-Colonial Studies programs, his work explores notions of chosen family, trauma, power, and mythologies of masculinity. His practice leans into the transcendent longing for connection locked within each of us, and the ways we get lost in translation when we become mired in our fears and preconceptions. No matter the medium, notions of healing and reconciliation guide his work, inviting an intuitive and spiritual lens to examine what often unseen resonances have been passed down and to explore how we might begin to break intergenerational cycles.

    Evan is an associate at Dot Connector Studio with seven years of experience in co-creation practices, cultural strategy, documentary and nonfiction storytelling, mission-driven producing, and facilitation with those invested in driving personal and community transformation. Evan has led over 50 special projects and programs with For Freedoms, the Guild of Future Architects, Sundance Film Festival / New Frontier, Cinereach, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MOCA LA, Magnum Foundation, The ICP Museum, Guardian US, Planned Parenthood, Pop Culture Collaborative, Bennett College, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, The Japanese American National Museum, The Armory Show, and many more, and has lectured for NYU Gallatin, Monument Lab, and Aperture Foundation.

“the prompts in the beginning wrecked me in a good way. so much to clear out and so much suppressed creativity.”

-Past Emergent Expression(s) Participant

“I was able to see my childhood through the lens of art and that was a joyful thing.”

Past Emergent Expression(s) Participant

“Thank you so much for creating such an incredible space to dive deep and vision broadly. It's been both a wonderfully unexpected respite and a creative engine starting challenge. Excited to continue the journey!”

Past Emergent Expression(s) Participant

Each workshop will be three hours and will include a guided meditation, one lecture, provocative individual and group creative exercises, transformational breakout processes, and group sharing.

what to expect

Workshop I: Tend Your Creative Roots

In this workshop we will explore our earliest creative impulses and influences. Often, these roots need a little bit of presence and restoration to absorb and feed the rest of our creative body.

We will address the following questions:

  • What is an emergent expression?

  • How do I relate to my creative self?

  • Where do I feel safe? What do I need to be brave?

  • How can I shift from being transactional and extractive with my creative self?

Workshop II: Cultivate Your Creative Soil

In this workshop we will invite you play. We will explore what our creative soil needs to thrive and design a practice in support. We will begin to explore what is alive for you creatively and how to gently allow these ideas to be supported by your creative roots.

We will explore the following questions:

  • How do I honor my creative self and claim agency over tending to my creative soil?

  • What do I want to grow? What nutrients/conditions/practices will support that?

  • What tools and skills can I turn to when I am stuck in resistance?

Workshop III: Nurturing the Leaves

In this workshop we will learn more about the practice of worldbuilding and how it applies to whatever creative ideas are emerging for you. We will play with time and perspective and let our characters and stories guide us.

We will explore the following questions:

  • What ideas are emerging for you creatively? What does it need to grow?

  • Which perspectives define the shape of your story?

  • How can you play with time? ex: Tense, Futurism, and Worldbuilding 

  • How can you celebrate, and continue to show up for, whatever wants to come through you?

Intimacy is our jam, so we encourage our participants to engage in the workshops with their cameras on.

JOIN US

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

- Howard Thurman

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

- Roald Dahl

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop. I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write. 

- Alexander Chee