Faculty Members of Creative Inquiry Interdisciplinary Arts

Program Director

Cindy Shearer, DA

Program Faculty Profiles

In real and invented life, Randall Babtkis, MFA (Columbia University), blends the immediacy of poetry with prose, art with artifact, colloquy with collage.  He is the founder of an early free media, cross-city/cross-genre work, The Telephone Project, produced in Venice, CA. He served as editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose and has organized colloquia combining film, digital media, spoken word poetry and performance at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.  Randall also taught writing workshops for the Academy of American Poets, curated a reading series at the Donnell Library, and read for the Academy’s Walt Whitman Award in New York. 

More recently, he codirected the graduate writing program at New College of California. Randall has published a chapbook, Banister, and has contributed to literary magazines. His work has appeared in national publications ranging from The Quarterly to Slash Magazine, and can be found in The Columbia Review and Five Fingers Review.  Randall is also director of Mission At Tenth, the MFA program's inter-arts journal.

Randall has written short pieces on Editorial Revision As An Act Of Exploration, Eudora Welty, The Writer as a Listening Thief, and Beryl Bainbridge for the Institute's Integral Education blog.

Anne Bluethenthal, MFA, is founder and Artistic Director of ABD Productions, a multiethnic and multicultural modern dance company, committed to activism in the arts.  A woman-centered, collaborative dance ensemble, ABD is dedicated to creating a language of movement that breaks the ordinary paradigm of Western dance and to presenting choreographies that face difficult issues with eloquence and passion.  Through her choreography and community collaborations, Bluethenthal has presented work on subjects such as Palestine-Israel, globalization, the environment, genocide, and the gift economy.  ABD received the SF Chronicle’s Best of 2001, SF Weekly’s Black Box, the SF Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award for Achievement in Dance, and the Rhinette Award for Best Choreography. 

Bluethenthal founded and produced the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival as well as the Dancing the Mystery series, a festival of dance, music, and poetry celebrating women’s spiritual traditions.  Certified by the American and London Societies for Teachers of the Alexander Technique, Bluethenthal maintains a private teaching practice. From 2005–2008, she served as co-director of the MFA Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts Program at New College of California.

Anne has written A Meditation on Movement and Politics of the Dancing Body: Covert Acts and the Transmission of Less for the Institute's Integral Education blog.

Kris Brandenburger, PhD, earned a doctorate in Humanities from CIIS. Her dissertation, "The Reddest Rose Unfolds: a girl’s own fish stories," is a multiple genre creative writing piece. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Violet Ink, the L.A. Review and several anthologies.  Kris has performed text-sound work at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music; The University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Ohlone College, Fremont; The Michigan Women’s Music Festival and several local clubs.  She founded The Feminist Bookie, An Author’s Agency—the first West Coast literary agency dedicated to feminist writers. She was also the founder of Select Electrics, a workshop for the repair of electrical systems on vintage race cars and museum quality restorations. 

As owner/technician of Select Electrics she was asked to present in “Women’s Car Links” at the Oakland Museum of California. Her interests are eclectic and centered in the intersections of the literary, visual and intellectual arts. She sees teaching as the ideal learning vehicle.

Kris has written short pieces for the Institute's Integral Education blog, including: Singing the Body Electric: The Living Structures of Art, Saint Gertrude, and What Is Creative Inquiry?

Carolyn Cooke's (MFA, Columbia University) fiction and nonfiction confront class, economics, gender, sexuality, and race in America, and her thinking about literature and pedagogy has been influenced by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, poststructuralist discourse, and relationships between spiritual life, material conditions, and social consciousness. Her novel, Daughters of the Revolution, and a collection of short stories called Amor & Psycho, are forthcoming from Knopf in 2011 and 2012. Her short-story collection, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin), won the PEN/Bingham award, was a finalist for the PEN/LL Winship Award, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other national magazines.  Visit Carolyn Cooke's website.

Her nonfiction reviews have appeared in The Nation and Contemporary Literary Criticism. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Djerassi Foundation, Ucross, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Columbia University. From 2006 to 2008, she served as codirector of the MFA Writing Program at New College of California. 

Carolyn has written short pieces for the Institute's Integral Education blog, including:  Danger and Beauty: Stories We Tell to Live, Pamela Z, The Human Synthesizer, Arundhati Roy on Democracy and Why the People of Kashmir Hate it So, and Going Graphic: The Comics and Tragics of Mere Literary Mortals.

Cindy Shearer, DA (State University of New York at Albany), is the director of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry. She has began teaching at CIIS in 1994, serving since 1998 as the director of the PhD in Humanities (Individualized Pathway) and as a faculty member in the Schools of Undergraduate Studies, and Consciousness and Transformation. Cindy has also taught at Rollins College (Winter Park, FL), University of Minnesota at Mankato, University of Southern Maine, and Antioch University, among other academic institutions. She practices and teaches writing as art, which she described in a 2003 exhibit as allowing her to “reconfigure the boundaries of writing and visual art,” join “tangible materials with the writing process,” and construct “visual work as I would a written text.”

In 2001, she created Ten Not-So-Tangible Tools for Writers, a meditation on the writing process in text and image. Cindy has also worked extensively as a workshop leader, freelance editor, consultant, and writing coach. She is rediscovering a love of short story writing and developing one for personal and familiar essays.

Cindy has written short pieces for the Institute's Integral Education blog, including: Image, Memory, and Writing as Art, Sustaining an Artist's Life at CIIS, and The Art of Fervor.

Read Cindy Shearer's full biography >>

Sarah Stone, MFA (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), has taught writing at University of California, Berkeley; New College of California; San Francisco State University; and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She has also written for/taught on Korean public television, reported on human rights, and worked with orphan chimpanzees in Bujumbura, Burundi. Her novel, The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday 2002/Anchor 2003), was a BookSense 76 selection and has been translated into German and Dutch, adopted for classroom and book club use, and discussed in Geoff Wisner’s A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa.  Sarah also wrote, with Ron Nyren, Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (Longman 2005), published in a trade version as The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing (Sourcebooks 2007). 

Other publications include short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews, including work in the McSweeney’s volume The Future Dictionary of America, the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and Ploughshares.  Her interests include the art and craft of imaginative writing, particularly iconoclastic, fantastic, political, and/or one-of-a-kind work; literatures that expand the boundaries of what we know about race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; and the ways in which literature and the arts can explore and embody consciousness. Visit Sarah Stone's website.

Sarah has written short pieces for the Institute's Integral Education blog, including: Getting the Writing Done: Discipline and Freedom, Interrupting Tragedy, Notes From the Middle of a Hilary Mantel Binge, and Finding Your Inner Compass.

Read Sarah Stone's full biography>>

Guest Faculty

Melanie DeMore: Singer-songwriter Melanie DeMore has a remarkable voice, weaving the fibers of African American folk music with soulful ballads, spirituals and her own original music. DeMore is a founding member of the Grammy nominated, critically-acclaimed vocal ensemble 'Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir', a group that tours extensively in the US and abroad.  In addition to her solo work, DeMore facilitates vocal workshops for professional and community-based choral groups. DeMore was a California Artist in Residence with the Oakland Youth Chorus for 10 years and has received an award from the Music Educators National Conference for her work with young singers and artists.

Daphne Gottlieb is the author of seven books in three genres, including four books of poetry (most recently, Kissing Dead Girls). She is the winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and is a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. As acclaimed for her performance as her writing, she has toured coast-to-coast across the United States, with engagements including Bumbershoot, South by Southwest, and Ladyfest Bay Area. She reads and writes in San Francisco.

Judy Grahn, winner of the 2009 Lambda Award in Lesbian Poetry for love belongs to those who do the feeling, is a lifetime artist, teacher, and activist, whose work has been foundational to more than one social movement in the U.S. and internationally, including LGBTQ and Women’s Spirituality. As a poet and social theorist, her work has been widely published, distributed, anthologized, and translated. She has presented her ideas in India, England, and Chile. Both her book length poems have been staged; many other poems have been choreographed and put to music in all genres from folk-rock to new music classical and rap. Judy performs and collaborates with musicians, dancers, and visual artists.

Her latest chapbook is Mental, a nine-part poem studying the subject of crazy. Much of Judy’s work centers on the reclamation of stories, values, and methods of Sacred Feminine traditions and archetypal characters. She teaches all genres of writing, aesthetics, cultural theory, and literature. Also, Judy edits and publishes Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture.

Check out Detroit Annie, Hitchhiking: How a Poem is Born by Judy Grahn, on the Institute's Integral Education blog.

Tricia Grame (M.F.A., Ph.D.) creates two and three dimensional art that is inspired by prehistoric female symbols. Her passion for the sculpted symbol took her to Italy and the islands of Malta, where hundreds of paintings, sculptures and etchings have been found depicting female energy. The painted word has become more integral in her paintings, as she attempts to decode the symbols, expand conventional language and create her own private language. As an artist, she continues to explore both history, personal issues and human concerns that stretch her creativity and reach beyond restricted boundaries.

Daria Halprin (MA, REATH, RSMTH, CAGS) is a dancer, actress, poet, writer, therapist, and teacher. She is among the leading pioneers in the field of expressive art therapy, bringing a lifelong passion and international practice with the living arts to her work. Author of The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy and cofounder of the internationally acclaimed Tamalpa Institute, Daria teaches around the world and leads a training program in expressive arts education, consultancy, and therapy. Her approach bridges the expressive arts, psychology, somatics, and performance, and has had a significant impact on students and leaders in the healing arts. www.tamalpa.org

Thomas Robert Simpson is an award winning actor, director, producer, and writer. He is the founder and artistic of the critically acclaimed AfroSolo Theatre. The past sixteen years he has produced the venerable AfroSolo Arts Festival in San Francisco. Mr. Simpson has produced over 100 emerging solo artists. He has also showcased celebrity artists such as: award-winning actor Ruby Dee, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory, beloved teacher, poet and social activist June Jordan, sensational black gospel singer Emmit Powell and many more. In 2006 he was won numerous awards including a coveted Bay Area Jefferson Award for Public Service and a prestigious Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisor for his artistic and civic contributions.

Visiting Artists, Teachers, and Mentors

Gus Bembery
Anne Carol Mitchell
Anshuman Chandra
Ellen Sebastian Chang
Melanie DeMore
Stephen Elliott
Laurie Fox
Thaisa Frank
Ruth Fraser
Charlotte Gordon
Daphne Gottlieb
Tricia Grame
Peggy Hackney
Joanna Haigood
Daria Halprin
Keith Hennessy
Jane Hirshfield
Shinichi Momo Iova-Koga
Stephanie Johnson
Judy Jordan
Debby Kajiyama
Alonzo King
Keba Konte
Sarah Kurtz
CK Ladzekpo
Genny Lim
Laura Glen Louis
Kelly Lydick
Jose Navarrete
MamaCoAtl
Sue Martin
Targol Mesbah
Jonathan Moscone
Silvia Nakkach
Jenni Olson
Jesse Olsen
Ann Packer
Laura Plumb
Nancy Quinn
Amy Reed
Jovelyn Richards
Zack Rogow
Karen Ryer
Danzy Senna
Zaid Shlah
Thomas Robert Simpson
Tim Stapleton
Lysley Tenorio
Truong Tran
Montel VanderHorck, III
Deirdre Visser
Debra Walker
Gene Luen Yang
Pamela Z