Swan Dive

Robert Sinclair - "Speculative World Builder" - An artist writes the future he wants to live in

Ron Rothberg and Stu Sheldon Season 9 Episode 4

Robert Earl Sinclair is a Future Architect & Speculative World-Builder striving to make sense of our rapidly changing world and co-create bold futures. Born in "the hood" of Los Angeles and challenged with dyslexia, Robert became a successful international hip-hop recording artist in his teens and went on to graduate from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Now, this multicultural, classically trained artist, actor and writer uses storytelling to activate the idea that if something is broken, we can fantasize about what it looks like unbroken, and that exercise, in and of itself, can help us to find our way to a solution. This is speculative world-building. In this pursuit, Robert’s dyslexia has become an asset, because dyslexic people experience information as story and possess a much higher retention of facts which allows Robert, a voracious reader, to draw from a vast store of resources and disciplines. Dedicated to beauty, justice and inclusive imagination, Robert designs at the crossroads of art, culture and technology and has created original content and world-building workshops for: NYU, Google Creative Lab, Sundance Film Festival, The Guggenheim, the Rockefeller Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, The Doris Duke Foundation and For Freedoms, where he co-created For Freedoms News and its month-long residency at the Brooklyn Museum. Robert is an original member of the Guild of Future Architects' celebrated Futurist Writers Room, a diverse community of visionary artists, intellectuals, engineers and technologists. Working with Dot Connector Studio, Robert is working to shape alternative economic models of sustainability and thrivability for everyone. Most recently, Robert has  lectured at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. He is currently teaching Emergent Expressions at the Harvard Divinity School.


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