Biography
Keith Cunningham is a screenwriter and consultant based in Chicago, Illinois and Munich, Germany. THE SOUL OF SCREENWRITING, the major book based on his seminars, will be published by Continuum in 2007 in the USA and UK.
Born and raised in the Unites States, Keith Cunningham graduated in Film from Northwestern University in 1974. Over the next 6 years, he cultivated a free-lance film career as a professional cameraman and gaffer. During this time, Keith met and worked with some decisively influential teachers and leaders, including mythologist Joseph Campbell, psychologist Jean Houston, philosopher Alan Watts, and writer Anaïs Nin.
He developed an interest in bringing his creative work together with the psychology of creativity, and earned a Master's Degree in Psychology in 1981, also at Northwestern University. Out of this training began Keith's first seminars on enhancing creativity, managing creative relationships, and lifelong creativity. He consulted for individual clients and creative groups such as theatre and dance companies.
A fortuitous meeting with Los Angeles screenwriter Tomas Schlesinger in 1980 led to a new synthesis of creativity and filmmaking. In 1982, Keith Cunningham took a full-time teaching position in the Columbia College Film and Video Department. He became a Columbia College Professor of Film and Video and remained with the department for 9 years. Among his students was Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (SCHINDLER'S LIST, etc.). Concurrently, in 1984, Keith began leading screenwriting and story development seminars worldwide with colleague Tom Schlesinger. Keith's presentation of Joseph Campbell's mythic perspective and its relevance for screenwriting at the American Film Institute, New York, in 1984, may be the first public joining together of mythmaking and screenwriting. Subsequent seminars for the AFI-Los Angeles, the Director's Guild and Writers' Guild of America (LA) led to the systematic elaboration of a new approach to screenwriting. Other leaders in the screenwriting field, such as Linda Seger and Chris Vogler, attended their seminars during those years.
Keith's renowned screenwriting seminars with his business partner expanded to Europe in 1989. Since that time he has conducted hundreds of seminars in many countries, ranging from Europe to Morocco, the Middle East, and beyond. Clients and sponsors have included at the Bavaria Studios Munich, RAI Television Rome, and ARD / ZDF national television in Germany, among many others. The seminar offerings also have expanded to include all major genres and advanced levels of teaching, story development groups, and consulting.
Along the way, his own scripts for TV episodes and films have been produced by RTL-TV and PRO-7 television in Germany.
Keith Cunningham's approach starts from within the writer's creative experience and goes to the sources of man's storytelling impulse. How do we get to the core of our story? How do we balance our concern for the created product with our own creative process? His seminars offer both experienced writers and newcomers, producers, directors, and other media professionals in-depth insight into screenwriting and story development. Cunningham's engaging and productive teaching methods, stimulating creative exercises, and film analyses enrich and refine the participant's own writing and understanding of stories in development. He illuminates the relationship between the creative process and the issues and emotions embedded in the story that often form a writer's blind spot.
With his unique background, Keith's has helped many writers through their creative blocks and on to successfully finished screenplays. This more comprehensive approach that includes both the creative process and the created product prepares writers to meet the commercial needs of the film industry in fresh and authentic ways. Many writers return to Keith Cunningham's workshops again and again, so rich do they find them for personal and professional growth.
After commuting between the USA and Europe for 10 years, Keith relocated to Zurich in 2000, where he undertook advanced psychological studies at the C.G. Jung Institute. He settled in Munich, Germany in 2004.
Keith's essays on myth, cinema and creativity have appeared in numerous journals and books. THE SOUL OF SCREENWRITING, the major book for writers based on his seminars, was completed in 2003 and is now scheduled for publication. Currently he is at work on two screenplay projects, one in Morocco and the other in Istanbul, as well as a book on his experiences teaching in Ramallah, Palestine. His commitment to cross-cultural understanding through shared storytelling goes back many years. Among other initiatives, he created video festivals and gave workshops at the Parliaments of the World's Religions (Chicago, 1993; Cape Town, 1999).
A series of books on film genres and further explorations into the mythic dimension of story are in the works for the near future.
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