Natasha Tsakos on Performance Art, Disruption, and Creativity

My guest this episode is Natasha Tsakos (@natashatsakos), TED speaker, recent graduate of Singularity University, and life-long performing and visual artist.   Throughout this interview Natasha and I discuss what it means to be creative and to never stop exploring one's own limits. Natasha has always been a performer, and describes using her imagination as an escape during her childhood. She graduated The New World School of the Arts in 2000, and has been performing on stages ever since. She has directed numerous one-woman shows, including this one on the TED stage in 2009.   Natasha has always had a rebellious streak. In college she needed to augment her academic arts education with street performance. Then, after graduating, she began self-funding her career through credit cards and creating art on any stage she could find, including one memorable show on the un-used stage of a strip-club on Miami Beach.   Through her shows, “technoformances,” books and a wide variety of other media, Natasha creates experiences for audiences designed to keep people thinking long after the show is over. Nor is she ever done refining her form.   This unwillingness to settle led her to Singularity University, and explore opportunities and challenges well outside of the arts. Singularity University, located in Silicon Valley, accepts 80 students from around the world each year for an intensive graduate study of rapidly scaling technologies, and humanity’s biggest problems. In Natasha’s words, they provided her with an understanding of the challenges facing the world today, and an understanding of some of the tools to solve them. In this interview, Natasha and I discuss what it means to be creativity and how creativity can be fostered.   You can learn more about Natasha and her work, on her website, Twitter, or Instagram.