Dr. Jonathan Feinstein, a professor at Yale University, studies the developmental paths of creative individuals, including entrepreneurs, inventors, artists and scientists. His book Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts was published in 2023. He is also the author of The Nature of Creative Development (2006). His current work focuses on models of creative engagement, centering on guidance, learning, opportunities, and paths of development. What do we choose to learn and explore as we develop our creative interests and passions? What opportunities arise, which projects do we pursue? His approach emphasizes the rich diverse patterns of development, unfolding over a few years or a lifetime.

On top of all this, he is an expert in the field of tax compliance and the analysis of audit and detection processes. At Yale, he teaches core statistics and runs the math book camp.

For more information:

• Dr. Feinstein’s web site at Yale University
• Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: Guiding Creative Engagement and Exploration, from Stanford University Press.
• The Nature of Creative Development, from Stanford University Press.

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2024 Keith Sawyer

Everyone who works in television and movie comedy knows Charna Halpern. She’s trained thousands of actors, writers, and producers at her Chicago theater, founded in 1981, called the iO theater. In this episode, Charna tells personal and funny stories about actors from Chris Farley and Neil Flynn to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Along with actor and director Del Close, Charna invented modern improvisational theater in the 1980s. The art form known as long form improvisation—a 20 or 30-minute fully improvised one-act play—was developed at the iO theater, and is still found on their stage at seven nights a week at 1501 N. Kingsbury Street in Chicago.

Charna is one of the best-known and best-loved people in comedy because she developed a system for training actors how to improvise together. Her training takes a full year and it’s so effective that TV producers, like Lorne Michaels, regularly visit iO theater to audition the actors who’ve graduated from the program. Sometimes on Saturday Night Live, every actor was once at the iO theater.

Charna created a family, a community, that she lovingly calls “my people.” Here are just a few of the famous actors and writers who we talk about in this episode (in order of mention): Lorne Michaels; Cecily Strong; Tina Fey; Amy Poehler; Mike Myers; Vanessa Bayer; Adam McKay; Brian Stack; Stephen Colbert; David Koechner; Rachel Dratch; Chris Farley; Sarah Silverman; Stephanie Ware; Neil Flynn; Larry David; Seth Myers; John Lutz; Matt Walsh; Tim Meadows. She even tells a story about how she let Adam McKay sleep on her couch before he was famous because he couldn’t afford to stay in Chicago.

When I was doing my research on improvisation in the early 1990s, the theater was called “Improv Olympic” and only later renamed “iO.” Don’t tell anyone I said that.

For more information:

• iO theater. https://ioimprov.com/
• Truth in Comedy. Charna Halpern, Del Close, Kim Howard Johnson.
• Art by Committee. Charna Halpern.

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

Dr. Mark Runco is a professor and is the Director of Creativity Research and Programming at Southern Oregon University. Over 35 years ago, he founded an influential scientific journal called The Creativity Research Journal and he was the editor of that journal until 2020. He’s published books that are widely read by creativity researchers such as his college textbook, Creativity: Research, Development, and Practice (three editions), The Creativity Research Handbook (1997, 2011, 2012), and the very first Encyclopedia of Creativity in 1999. He’s known for his studies of core topics in creativity research including problem finding, assessment, and divergent thinking. His recent writings are critical of the widespread claim that Gen AI is creative. He argues that creativity is unique to humans, and we’re going to talk about that today.

Mark developed and still teaches seminars on creativity, including "Creativity: What It Is and What It Is Not," "The Assessment of Creativity," "Creative Cognition," and "Social Contexts for Creativity." He is past president of Division 10 (Psychology, Art, Creativity, and Aesthetics) of the American Psychological Association. Episodes 23 and 24 of this podcast are about the annual conference of Division 10.

Additional information:

Mark Runco’s web site

First edition of Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1999 (with Steven Pritzer)

Second edition, 2011 (with Steven Pritzker)

Creativity: Research, Development, and Practice (third edition, 2023)

The Creativity Research Handbook (third edition, 2012)

Music by license from SoundStripe:

"Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ

"Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ

"What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

Steve Heller is arguably the world’s best-known design educator, with over 200 books on graphic design, illustration, and political art. I interviewed him for my 2025 book Learning to See. His books include Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design; Teaching Graphic Design; and The Education of an Illustrator (with Marshall Arisman). He’s spent most of his career at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he’s now the Special Assistant to the President and the Co-Founder and Co-Chair Emeritus of the MFA Design Department. He’s won numerous awards including Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Mind Award; Smithsonian Design Museum; National Endowment for the Arts; AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement; and many others. For 33 years, he was an art director at the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. In this interview, he gives amazing insights about how to teach graphic design and illustration.

For more information:

• Steve Heller’s web site
• Book: Teaching Graphic Design
• Book: The Education of an Illustrator
• Sawyer's book Learning to See

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

The much-anticipated art and design book Learning to See was just published by MIT Press! In this episode, author Keith Sawyer talks with Amy Climer about his new book. Learning to See is an engaging and profound account of how professional artists and designers create and how they teach others to do it. Keith spent over ten years interviewing a hundred professors who’ve taught in 50 different colleges, universities, and institutes. He also interviewed students to learn about the personal transformation they go through as they learn to see and think like successful creative professionals. Learning to See describes project assignments and studio class sessions in over 20 different disciplines, revealing the shared essence of art and design.

Learning to See tells the stories of the professional artists and designers who teach in BFA and MFA programs throughout the U.S., including top schools in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These articulate and experienced educators share their insights about how to guide younger artists and designers to realize their full creative potential. In the best BFA and MFA programs, students learn to see things they couldn’t see before, and they learn to think in new ways. In Learning to See, you meet professors and students in over 20 different art and design disciplines—from painting and sculpture to graphic design and architecture. By reading what they say in their conversations and their classrooms, you learn that becoming an artist or designer is not about learning to draw or sew or weld—it is about learning to see.

This book is for anyone who wants to better understand how professional artists and designers see, think, and make.

Notes

Book web site: Learning to See

Keith Sawyer's web site: www.keithsawyer.com

Amy Climer's web site: www.climerconsulting.com

Music by license from SoundStripe:

"Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ

"Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ

"What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

We're going to leave the podcast studio and travel to Yale University for the 2025 creativity research conference! This is the second of two episodes bringing you cutting-edge research from the conference. This episode has five interviews with leading-edge creativity researchers. There were over two hundred researchers at Yale, from around the world, including Japan, India, Europe, and South America. This is the official American Psychological Association creativity research conference. In this episode, you'll hear about research that is SO NEW that it hasn't even been published yet. Top creativity researchers attend this conference each year so that they can find out about the latest research findings, and now you can hear about it, too. This episode takes you to the conference room floor. Listen to this episode and also the last one, because there is too much great research for just one episode! Dr. Sawyer invited five researchers to tell us about their latest research findings, and there are six more in the last episode.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

0:35 Paul Silvia - Co-organizer of the conference

8:04 Hansika Kapoor - Dark creativity

17:41 Takeshi Okada - Living with art

27:00 Interlude

27:51 Angie Miller - Strategic National Arts Alumni Program

36:48 Taylor Worley - Slow looking

51:45 Outro

55:58 Closer

Resources

Conference web site

Conference detailed schedule of presentations

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

We're going to leave the podcast studio and travel to Yale University for the 2025 creativity research conference! This episode has six interviews with leading-edge creativity researchers and the next episode has five more. There were over two hundred researchers at Yale, from around the world, including Japan, India, Europe, and South America. This is the official American Psychological Association creativity research conference. In this episode, you'll hear about research that is SO NEW that it hasn't even been published yet. Top creativity researchers attend this conference each year so that they can find out about the latest research findings, and now you can hear about it, too. This episode takes you to the conference room floor. Listen to this episode and the next one, because there is too much great research for just one episode! Dr. Sawyer invited six researchers to tell us about their latest research findings, and there are five more in the next episode.

Chapters

1:49 Conference welcome from Roni Reiter-Palmon

2:49 Kristin Lamb: Imagination and Creativity

9:40 Ahmad Rahimi: Using Large Language Models to Assess Student Creativity with Games

13:43 Interlude

14:41 Shoshi Kesari: Improv Theater with Adults

20:34 Denis Dumas: Children and the balance between originality and appropriateness

31:15 Michael Mumford: Creativity research from the 1970s to today

42:11 Outro

43:19 Closer

Resources

Conference web site

Conference detailed schedule of presentations

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Sawyer

Dr. Leidy Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia, and the author of the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. In this episode, we talk about how his research contributes to our understanding of how to approach and solve problems and how to change and innovate. This is an insightful conversation between two psychologists who really love to study how people think and act! Dr. Klotz's research is about so much more than creativity, but his research is linked to a lot of creativity topics, including editing during the process, architectural design, and education. Please take a look at Dr. Leidy Klotz’s book, which is called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, and visit his web site at leidyklotz.com.

Music by license from SoundStripe:

• "Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
• "Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
• "What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

Copyright (c) 2024 Keith Sawyer