TEACHING
ARTIST RESIDENCIES + ALTERNATIVE TEACHING
Lynn Book has been an artist in residence in a range of settings with involve teaching and/or public engagement. These include festivals, educational and arts organizations including, Hong Kong Institute for Education in 2015, Art Stays International Contemporary Art Festival in Ptuj, Slovenia in 2010, 2011 and 2022, Sarah Lawrence College, New York in 2010 and 2013, The Kitchen Summer Institute in New York City from 1999 – 2005, and Movement Research in New York City, the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago 1994, 1995 and 2007, and summer residencies with Transart Institute, 2004 – 2016 in Berlin and Austria, among others. Her investigations into body, imagination, voice and public action guide these engagements that involve writing and voice experimentation, physical encounters with environments and activation of architectural and urban lives and histories towards communal futuring of people, place and potential.
Book founded Voicelab, an educational and cultural center in New York City in 1999 through which she produced emerging and established artists developing innovative approaches to voice in original performance works at locations including: Dixon Place, 92nd Street Y/Makor and Vineyard Theater, HERE, and elsewhere. She also taught and coached individuals in private practice through Voicelab until 2005 and continues to teach her ‘voicing bodies’’ pedagogy in various settings around the world.
She has presented on a range of subjects, including her body of work, her practice and pedagogy, engaged research approaches, and her academic body of work on creativity. Universities, museums, and other hosts in the US have included: Harvard University, Museum of Modern Art, Northwestern University, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University and University of North Carolina Greensboro, Wabash College, University of Maine. Outside the US her work has been seen and heard in conferences and creative spaces that include: York University, UK, and University of Queensland, AU, Sudlab, Naples IT, Muszi, Budapest, HU, Berlin, DE, where she has delivered artist talks, participated in conference panels and taught labs and/or workshops, often performing or showing her own work in context.
ACADEMIC TEACHING + ENGAGEMENT
From 2005 – 2022, Lynn Book taught interdisciplinary creativity to undergraduates in the liberal arts college of Wake Forest University in North Carolina in the US. As former Director for the Program for Creativity and Innovation there, she developed innovative curricula, hybrid events and international symposia including “Creativity: Worlds in the Making”, “Women, Entrepreneurship, Food and Place”, and “IF Labs (Inventing Futures)”, a maker festival. In 2016 to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the art movement Dada, she organized and directed “DADA!! 100 Years of Edge Innovation” in tandem with many arts and educational institutions across the globe. This immersive day-long event occurred throughout the entire Z. Smith Reynolds Library, with roundtable discussions, performances, film projections and interactive ‘chance operations’. She edited (with David Phillips) and contributed chapters to “Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Changing Currents in Education and Public Life” (Elgar, 2013), derived from her practice-led research in ‘critical creativity’ and investment in radically enlivening liberal arts education through what she has termed, ‘collaborative culture projects’.
Book has been a core faculty associate with Transart Institute since its inception in 2004 as one of the first ‘low-residency’ MFA programs in the world, now with a focus on global PhD candidates in creative practices, accredited by John Moores Liverpool University in the UK. At Transart, she has been involved in deeply investigative and co-evolved structures, in-person residencies in Berlin and Austria, workshops, and online publications and festivals.
Foundational to her development as an ‘artist who teaches’, Lynn Book received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. She was invited to co-develop courses for (and eventually direct) a leading edge “4-Dimensional Design” program, as well as new experimental body and voice oriented Performance courses (1985–95). She also served as a graduate advisor there.
Book has also served on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, NY, Columbia College, Chicago, and has been a graduate advisor at DePaul University, Chicago, Rutgers University, NJ, and New York University, NY.