Visual art can offer rich inspiration for writing, just as writing can deepen your connection to a work of art. Join Mary Hall Surface, popular creative writing instructor for the Smithsonian Associates, the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center and more, for a close look at Romare Bearden’s Tomorrow I May be Far Away and Joan Miro’s The Farm. Discover how memory and metaphors inform the paintings and can inspire your own memoir writing. Participants engage with the art through multi-sensory exploration, word sketching, and diverse writing prompts crafted to discover inspiring aspects of the paintings and to uncover new potentials as writers.

Mary Hall Surface, teaching artist, playwright, and theatre director, presents workshops nationwide as a Kennedy Center teaching artist, as a Smithsonian Associates guest artist, as the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s Writing Salon, and as a faculty member of Harvard’s Project Zero Classroom, 2014- 19. Her plays have been produced at theatres, museums, and festivals throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Canada, including 17 productions at the Kennedy Center. She has written and directed live plays for the National Gallery of Art inspired by visual art. She has been nominated for nine Helen Hayes Awards, receiving the 2002 Outstanding Director of a Musical. Mary Hall has published 12 plays, 3 original cast albums, 2 collections of scenes and monologues, an anthology of her plays and numerous articles. She was the founding artistic director of the DC’s Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival and was a member of Arena Stage’s 2017 Playwrights’ Arena. The National Gallery of Arts’ Writing Salon was featured in April in The Washington Post Magazine. www.maryhallsurface.com