Background

Michèle Root-Bernstein was born on February 13, 1953 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, into the family of Franklin Russell and Liliane (Weissbrodt) Root.

Education

Michele Root-Bernstein received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 and a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 1981.

Career

Michèle Root-Bernstein has taught history, writing and creativity studies. She started as a visiting scholar in the history department at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1985 and worked there until 1987. In 1993 - 1995 she was a writer-in-residence at Pinecrest Elementary School. She also held the position of a visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing in 1994 and a teacher at Tools of Thought Workshop in Happendance Modern Dance Company in 1995.

Over the past decade Michèle has worked with dance educator Diane Newman and her advanced composition class at the Happendance School in Okemos, Michigan and with Lynnette Overby, Professor of Dance at Michigan State University, on various workshops and related projects. As Kennedy Center Teaching Artists, Michele and Lynnette co-present the workshop, “Thinking Tools and the Multi-Disciplinary Imagination: Exploring Abstraction in Haiku and Dance,” as part of the Kennedy Center’s Partner’s in Education Program.

Michèle currently works with an interdisciplinary research group at Michigan State University interested in cultural creativity. As part of that team, she received a Faculty Incentive Grant in 2008 for the research project, Art Class and the High-Tech Entrepreneur: Is There a Connection? Other current research and writing focus on the invention of imaginary worlds in childhood and adulthood. In addition, Michele has written books about the history of popular theater in eighteenth-century France. As part of her own trans-disciplinary learning and creating, she also publishes personal essays and haiku.

Achievements

• Michèle Root-Bernstein is highly notable as the author of books Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris and Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Inventing Imaginary Worlds: From Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts and Sciences

    (How can parents, educators, business leaders and policy m...)

    2014
  • Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People

    (Creativity isn't born, it's cultivated — this innovative ...)

    1999
  • Honey, Mud, Maggots, and Other Medical Marvels: The Science Behind Folk Remedies and Old Wives' Tales

    (Surveys alternative medicine from the ancient past to the...)

    1997
  • The Haiku Life 2017
  • Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris 1984

Views

Michèle Root-Bernstein studies creative imagination across the arts and sciences, with particular attention to the thinking skills common to all disciplines. Dance and body thinking provide Michèle with an important focus for her process-oriented approach to trans-disciplinary learning and creating.

Quotations: “I began as an academic but gave up that career because jobs were scarce. I wanted to live in the same city as my husband, and wanted, above all, to raise my children by my own hand. Besides, I liked researching and writing far more than teaching. While my children were young I worked hard to ‘unlearn’ my formal training; I wrote an historical play, an historical novel, short stories and poems, nearly all of which remain unpublished."

Interests

• writing fiction and poetry, reading, drawing

Connections

Michèle Root-Bernstein married Robert Bernstein, a professor of physiology, on September 2, 1978. They have two children - Meredith and Brian.

Father:

Franklin Russell Root

Mother:

Liliane (Weissbrodt) Root

Spouse:

Robert Bernstein

Dughter:

Meredith Bernstein

Son:

Brian Bernstein