In 2019 storytelling pioneer Murray Nossel founded the World Mother Storytelling Project, a unique non-profit that teaches healing and empowerment through telling of one’s mother story. Nossel — an author, improvisational actor, clinical psychologist, and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker — often partners with the Open Society, and the State Department to work with disrupted communities and victims of violence. His approach to storytelling emphasizes active listening, empathy, and personal agency.
In 2024, Nossel teamed up with the painter Doug Safranek on the nonprofit’s first arts-based community engagement project, an immersive art exhibit called “Conduit.”
Blending storytelling, painting and music, “Conduit” opened at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in June 2024. Originally scheduled to be on view until August, it was extended to run through October.
In “Conduit” 30 Harlem community members celebrate their mothers, or the women who nurtured them by telling their mother stories. The stories, broadcast on a soundtrack, are full of moments of grace, fortitude, resilience and sacrifice… The faces of these Harlem community members — a mix of the recently arrived, transplants and Harlemites of several generations — are rendered in majestic egg tempera by Safranek, a renowned realist painter whose work is in public and private collections around the country.
Media Blitz serves as the director of marketing and external communications for the World Mother Storytelling Project.