Carol Becker is Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. Before this position she was Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of California, San Diego and has worked closely with the World Economic Forum to build their art and culture programming. She also is the author of several books and numerous articles. Her books include: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production and the memoir Losing Helen.

Since so much of human external action has been stopped, and we now are living in this great Pause, how has our slow-down affected the planet?

What might we learn from this catastrophe about our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the natural world. How might art and artists emerge from this as more obviously central to the collective well being of humans and the earth? 

 In Shambala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa writes that, “…healing our society goes hand-in-hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.”

Artists have a great role to play in making this recuperative process visible. 

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