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Patricia Ryan Madson is an American actress, author, and educator. She is a senior lecturer in drama, emerita, at Stanford University, and wrote the book Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up, New York, which was published in 2005.
Madson began her university teaching career as an assistant professor of drama at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1969. [1]
In 1977 Stanford University offered her the position of leading the undergraduate Acting program. She founded the Stanford Improvisors in 1991 and launched an academic program to study improvisation at the university. [2] In 1998 she won the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Innovation in Undergraduate Education. [3]
Her tenure at Stanford University teaching undergraduates lasted from 1977 to 2005. Now a Stanford University emerita, she teaches beginning and advanced-level improvisation courses for adults through Stanford's Continuing Studies Program. She was also the founding director of the Stanford Improv Summer Stock (1993 and 1994), featuring Keith Johnstone as a guest. [4]
Madson has also consulted for businesses and philanthropic and educational groups. [5] She founded “The Creativity Initiative, [6] ” an alliance of Stanford faculty who believed creativity could be taught. Financial consultants like Douglas Tsoi [7] and best-selling authors like Daniel Pink [8] reference Madson's work. She has also been a featured speaker [9] at talks at Google.
Madson was a guest [10] on the top-rated podcast, Business Minds Coffee Chat. The episode was released on November 9, 2023.
Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.
Improvisation, often shortened to improv, is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. The origin of the word itself, is in the Latin 'improvisus', which literally means un-foreseen. But it is also related to both the old French word 'emprouer' and the English 'improve', to improve. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of improvisation can apply to many different faculties, across all artistic, scientific, physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines; see Applied improvisation.
Robert Keith McFerrin Jr. is an American jazz singer and songwriter. He is known for his vocal techniques, such as singing fluidly but with quick and considerable jumps in pitch—for example, sustaining a melody while also rapidly alternating with arpeggios and harmonies—as well as scat singing, polyphonic overtone singing, and improvisational vocal percussion. He is widely known for performing and recording regularly as an unaccompanied solo vocal artist. He has frequently collaborated with other artists from both the jazz and classical scenes.
Creativity techniques are methods that encourage creative actions, whether in the arts or sciences. They focus on a variety of aspects of creativity, including techniques for idea generation and divergent thinking, methods of re-framing problems, changes in the affective environment and so on. They can be used as part of problem solving, artistic expression, or therapy.
Viola Spolin was an American theatre academic, educator and acting coach. She is considered an important innovator in 20th century American theater for creating directorial techniques to help actors to be focused in the present moment and to find choices improvisationally, as if in real life. These acting exercises she later called Theater Games and formed the first body of work that enabled other directors and actors to create improvisational theater. Her book Improvisation for the Theater, which published these techniques, includes her philosophy and her teaching and coaching methods, and is considered the "bible of improvisational theater". Spolin's contributions were seminal to the improvisational theater movement in the U.S. She is considered to be the mother of Improvisational theater. Her work has influenced American theater, television and film by providing new tools and techniques that are now used by actors, directors and writers.
Spontaneous Broadway is an advanced long-form improvised performance, based on audience suggestions. The audience typically submits titles of songs that have never been written, and the performers choose suggestions to create songs, the audience votes through acclamation on their favorite song, which is then used as the core of a brand new Broadway musical.
Kathy Kinney is an American actress, voice actress, and comedian. She became widely known in the late 1990s for playing Mimi Bobeck, the outrageously made-up, flamboyantly vulgar, and vindictive nemesis of Drew Carey on the sitcom The Drew Carey Show. She had been involved in television, feature film, and stage work for years.
Charna Halpern is an American comedian who is co-founder of the ImprovOlympic, now known as iO. Upon iO's founding, in 1983, with partner Del Close, she began teaching Harold to many students in the Chicago theater community. Many prominent comedians performed at iO, from Neil Flynn to Jack McBrayer. Also appearing were up and coming comedic minds such as Craig Cackowski.
Larry Jay Diamond is an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University's main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond served as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2009-2016. He was succeeded in that role by Francis Fukuyama and then Kathryn Stoner.
Friday Nite Improvs, or Friday Night Improvs (FNI), was a long-running weekly improvisational comedy show staged on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The show functioned as an improv jam, performed by improv actors who don't normally work together. FNI was unique in that, in addition to the audience's providing improv suggestions, the performers are all pulled from volunteers in the audience. FNI ended in 2014. A student improv group, Ruckus, has succeeded FNI as a resident improv group on the University of Pittsburgh's campus.
I Love You Because is a musical set in modern-day New York. It is based on Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. It features lyrics by Ryan Cunningham, set to music by Joshua Salzman.
Daniel H. Pink is an American author. He has written seven New York Times bestsellers. He was a host and a co-executive producer of the National Geographic Channel social science TV series Crowd Control. From 1995 to 1997, he was the chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore.
Fernando Garibay is a Mexican-American record producer, songwriter, entrepreneur, author, and academic.
Louise Lamphere is an American anthropologist who has been distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico since 2001. She was a faculty member at UNM from 1976–1979 and again from 1986–2009, when she became a professor emerita.
Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology.
Whitney Chadwick is an American art historian and educator, who has published on contemporary art, modernism, Surrealism, and gender and sexuality. Her book Women, Art and Society was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1990 and revised in 1997; it is now in its fifth edition. Chadwick is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University from the School of Art.
Charity Scott was an American legal scholar who was a Professor of Law Emerita at Georgia State University, known for founding the Center for Law, Health, and Society at Georgia State University.
Julie Lythcott-Haims is an American educator, author, and politician. She has written three non-fiction books: How to Raise an Adult, on parenting; Real American, a memoir; and Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. She served as dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford University. She is a member of the Palo Alto city council.
Sara Elaine Brownell is an American biology education researcher who is a professor at Arizona State University. Her research looks to make undergraduate science teaching more inclusive. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.