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Brian Bates

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Brian Bates is the author of six internationally best-selling books, including The Real Middle-earth, The Way of Wyrd, The Human Face, and The Way of the Actor. He is leading the movement to recover imagination as a powerful tool in our personal and working life and to bring it to the forefront of 21st-century inspiration. His books and seminars bring together the insights of ancient European wisdom traditions with leading-edge research in the mind sciences to deal with issues facing people in the modern world.

Brian is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His work on imagination includes his directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He trained future Academy Award winners and stars there, including Kenneth Branagh, Ralph Fiennes, Jane Horrocks, Sean Bean, and Timothy Spall.

Brian has developed ways to teach imagination and performance in business settings. He lectures internationally to business, arts, and general audiences, including a series of seminars on creativity jointly with actor John Cleese. Currently Research Director of the Christensen Foundation (Palo Alto) project on recovering the nature-based knowledge of ancient England, he is also Senior Adviser to the Ford Foundation funded project on worldwide indigenous wisdom - ‘The Council of Elders’ - working closely with tribal elders and medicine people to protect and document their knowledge. 

Brian was recently honored by these elders, who designated him a ‘wizard’ in recognition of his work in reconstructing the shamanic traditions of the Anglo-Saxons for application to life today.<br><br>Born and educated in England, Brian then took degrees at the Universities of California, Berkeley, and Oregon, worked in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Research Institute and at Cambridge University, England.

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Way of the Actor

Emma Watson
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