Biography

Cindy Shearer, Professor and Program Chair for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing at CIIS, is the author of Stay With Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life. A writer, text-image artist, and curator, she shapes innovative interdisciplinary spaces where writers and artists converse across disciplines, mediums and forms, further develop their skills and capacities, and engage the complexity of and possibilities within writing and artmaking. She also co-designed and co-leads the Creative Dissertation Pathway, focusing on art practice as research, for the Ph.D. in East-West Psychology at CIIS. Her essay, “Thirteen Acts of Seeing Further: Creative Writing as Text-Image Art and A Quest for Care,” appears in Empathy in Creative Writing: Ethics, Diversity and Communication. Cindy is also an experienced writing consultant and coach.

Education

Doctor of Arts (D.A.), State University of New York at Albany 

M.A., Antioch University

Publications

Shearer C. (2025), Stay With It: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life, Bloomsbury Academic.

Shearer C. (2026). Thirteen Acts of Seeing Further: Creative Writing as Text-Image Art and A Quest for Care. In G. Harper, (Ed.), Empathy in Creative Writing: Ethics, Diversity and Communication, Palgrave. 

Shearer C. (2024). Interview with Graeme Harper. In Graeme Harper, 20th Anniversary New Writing interviews: an interview not with Judith Schalansky. New Writing, 2024, VOL. 21, NO. 2, 148–152.

Shearer C. (2018). The Art of Image: Seeing the Way Home. In M. Garbutt & N. Roenpagel (Eds.) & A. Rourke & V. Rees (Series Curators), The mindful eye: Contemplative pedagogies in visual arts education. Transformative pedagogies in the visual domain: Book No. 3. Common Ground Research Networks, Champaign, IL.

Shearer C. (2011). Dementia Moment. Mission at Tenth, Best of Issue (Volume 8).

Selections

Lost-Proof, Artifact Series, Season One  

Meaning Making, Meaning Making Series, Episode 1

Art as Inquiry