Gwen Gordon is a coach, facilitator, organizational consultant and designer of educational experiences, who started her career designing and building Muppets™ for Sesame Street. She is a pioneer in the field of transpersonal play, which she teaches at numerous Bay Area institutes including Spirit Rock Meditation Center, as well as offering her own public playgroups. She is published widely on the subject and integrates this unique expertise into all areas of her work. Gwen enables her clients to widen and deepen their playgrounds toward lives of artful play and more effective living. Currently she consults to IDEO as the lead designer of a training process for the Transportation Security Administration and its deployment to over 47,000 of its workers.
Gwen entered the field of coaching and leadership training after serving as the education director for the Institute for Deep Ecology, where she developed a leadership program called Education for the Love of Life. She is currently a leadership trainer for the Coaches Training Institute, an in collaboration with CTI’s co-founder, Henry Kimsey-House, developed and delivered a coaching mastery training called Come Alive! The Artful Play of Coaching. The program will continue to be provided internationally to graduates of CTI’s coaches training in 2009. She is also a leader of CTI’s year long Co-Active Leadership Training. Gwen formerly taught at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology and Holy Names University.
Gwen has been designing educational experiences since 1989 when she created the Big Picture Puzzle, a global community arts program using a large puzzle of the Earth. She spent five years providing customized puzzle workshops to communities ranging from prisons to corporations. She has been a lead designer of numerous programs including West Coast Green and the study guide for the film, What the Bleep Do We Know?!
In her early career, Gwen was part of the Vivarium, an Apple Computer research group at the MIT Media Lab where she created new ways for children to learn about animal behavior and built the first stuffed animal input device. She was the creative director of the multimedia company, Tell Tale Technologies, where she designed alternative input devices. Gwen founded her own production company, Creatures at Large (CaL) and produced award-winning programs for children, one of which earned her an Emmy. She spent a year collaborating with research scientists at Xerox PARC to explore the conditions that give rise to innovation.
Gwen received her BA at Wesleyan University and an MA in philosophy and religion at the California Institute for Integral Studies. In addition to her academic background, Gwen draws from in-depth training in mindfulness and loving-kindness, Tibetan Buddhism, the Diamond Approach, and Advaita Vedanta. Gwen has studied integral theory, Jungian dreamwork, Systems Theory, Theater of the Oppressed, Non-violent Communication, the Harvard Negotiation Project, Masterful Conversations, a wide range of expressive arts modalities, and Gwen Gordon, MA
her own brand of body based play practices.
