A Series of Storytelling Workshops
Each three-hour session will have 3 components: a visiting storyteller of note who will share his experiences and stories; a briefreview of an aspect of storytelling; finally we will review and workshop attendees stories that can be presented verbally or if inwriting, we ask that they submit a page or less online a few days before the class. Longer form submissions are welcome butmay be workshopped in a subsequent class.
This class is taught by Academy and Emmy nominated Jerome Gary with support from visiting storytellers.
Jerome Gary is an Academy Award and Emmy nominated filmmaker and teacher. He is the
Chairman of Visionaire Media and the MENA Media Fund, which in association with the US
Department of State, invests in media in the Middle East and North Africa. Currently, the fund
has more than twenty projects in various stages of development or production. Thus far, one
feature film and eight pilots have been produced; five have gone to series; three have had a
second season and one a third season. His film credits include the Academy Award nominated
Pumping Iron; Stripper; Old Boyfriends; The Gathering; Life After Death; Generation Iron and
Confessions From A War. And in television, The Russians (Series/TNT), Laughs (Series/HBO);
Rebel Highway (Showtime); On the Road in America (three seasons/Sundance; MBCI);
American Caravan; Arab Muslim Women (Series MBC1), and Trading Places.
He also served as the President of Production at Cinema 5 (1978-1980), an independent film
studio; President of Visionaire Communications (1981- 86); and the Strategic Director for USC’s
Institute for Creative Technologies (2000-2006). He has been the recipient of more than $32
million in federal grants for media and public diplomacy related projects and has worked
extensively in the Middle East since 2004.
While very active in film and television, for thirteen years he was senior lecturer in screenwriting
and directing at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies.
He was the Senior Screenwriting Instructor (Chair) for seven years and the Senior Directing
Instructor for three. He was on the directing faculty at the University of Southern California
School of Cinema and Television for ten years. He has taught directing, screenwriting, and
storytelling at the Los Angeles Film School, Esalen Institute, Yale University, Dartmouth, The
University of Hawaii and in numerous foreign countries. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, he went to
Afghanistan three times, leading teams of 10 teachers to teach two-week media capacity building in Kandahar. Graduation certificates were awarded to 138 participants. Since 2018, he has taught storytelling and screenwriting to more than 1200 students, filmmakers and teachers in masterclasses in Cairo, Tunis (2), Rabat (3), Marrakech (2) and Beirut (5). He has also taught storytelling to traumatized children in Kandahar and Kabul. He produced iDiplomacy, a two-day symposium on citizen diplomacy at the Gallup Organization sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Gallup. He has twice been spokesperson for the Media Committee at the DOHA forum. He has published ‘papers’ and lectured on ‘Trauma and Fractured Narrative’ in Beirut, Cairo, Rabat and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He was also President of the Jury at the Carthage Film Festival and the Rabat Festival des Auteurs.
He graduated from Yale University with Honors in History of the Arts and Letters and is a
member of the WGA and DGA. He is married to Mary Lambert, the film director, and they have
a son, Jordan.
Arturo Muñoz
Arturo G Muñoz entered the CIA in March 1980 and retired in December 2008. He is currently
writing Covert Operations: Lessons Learned a series of books for RAND and CIA. He began his career as an intelligence analyst, briefing policymakers and writing Intelligence Assessments (IAs), and also shorter reports for the NID and the PDB. He also travelled abroad to investigate pressing intelligence issues in-country. In 1984, Muñoz was detailed to the United States Southern Command in Quarry Heights, Panama, to support its counterinsurgency programs in Latin America. In 1986 , he joined CIA's Directorate of Operations. He became a certified case officer, recruiting and handling foreign intelligence (FI) agents in Latin America and the Balkans. After 9/11, his main focus was counterterrorism. He deployed to Afghanistan, as well as other countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. He developed expertise in covert action (CA), especially psychological operations, and instituted innovative projects that proved to be effective. After his retirement, Muñoz joined the RAND Corporation in February 2009 as a Senior Political Scientist. He returned to Afghanistan to implement research on US military Information Operations and also various aspects of the war against the Taliban. RAND and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) have published these studies. Today he remains an adjunct at RAND. Muñoz has an M.A. in Anthropology, a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University, and is A.B.D in Anthropology at UCLA, having conducted fieldwork with the Emberá and Yanomamo Indians.