Julie Burstein is a Peabody Award-winning radio producer, TED speaker, and best-selling author who has spent her working life in conversation with highly creative people – interviewing, probing, guiding, and creating live events and public radio programs about them and their work. In her book Spark: How Creativity Works, she maps out some of the coordinates and dimensions of creativity. No one can exactly explain creativity, but Julie offers a tour through some of its essential byways; shining a beam onto its mysterious workings in a way that is illuminating and can help us find more of that dimension within ourselves, and put it to good use.
Here's what Vanity Fair says about the book: "In Spark, Burstein offers enlightening answers from the culture's heavy hitters, including Chuck Close, Yo-Yo Ma, and Richard Ford, on which experiences, memories, tragedies, or landscapes ignited their imaginations, as well as the process by which they stoked these embers into a roaring fire, and how you, yes, you, might too."
Julie’s TED talk 4 Lessons in Creativity has been viewed more than two million times. She hosted Spark Talks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and produced and directed the museum's TEDxMet in 2013, the first TEDx in an art museum, which dazzled the audience with talks from curators, artists, dancers, and a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. The Met asked Julie to collaborate on the second TEDxMet, in September of 2015. Julie often speaks about creativity and innovation at museums, corporations, and universities.
In 2000, Julie created Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, public radio’s premiere program about creativity, entertainment and the arts. Julie is also the host of the podcast pursuitofspark.com, conversations about creative approaches to the challenges, possibilities, and pleasures of everyday life and work.
When Julie is not writing, making radio, producing events, or spending time with her family, she can usually be found in the pottery studio.