Dr. Brooke Hessler has been a high school dropout and a tenured professor, an organizational communication specialist and a community literacy activist, a yogi and a scholar-adventurer. In various ways, she continues to be all those things, continually re-authoring her future as a story-maker, teacher, and learner. An award-winning educator and Fellow of the DaVinci Institute for academic innovation, Brooke co-founded (with Beyond Storytelling co-presenter Elizabeth Woodworth) a Texas-based nonprofit corporation for community-based, arts-integrated writing programs; she also co-founded the Virtual Archives Project, a 12-year transformative learning partnership that trained college students in primary research and multimedia storytelling through hands-on work with museum artifacts. Brooke has co-facilitated digital storytelling workshops on four continents and mentored hundreds of students in the U.S. and Singapore in the uses of digital narrative for critical reflection, community arts praxis, mass communication, and intercultural dialogue.
Her scholarship on pedagogy and story-work has appeared in Community Literacy Journal and in Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives (Palgrave 2017), among other journals and collections.After serving 14 years as Carrithers Chair of Writing and Composition at Oklahoma City University, Brooke followed her bliss to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she now teaches writing, digital storytelling, and Yoga for Mindful Learning to artists and designers at California College of the Arts.
