Todd Thomas Brown

Todd is a practicing artist, cultural strategist and creative coach/consultant presently based in the historic medieval village of Fontecchio in the mountainous interior of Abruzzo, Italy. In recent years, his work has been dedicated to imagining and developing cultural initiatives that serve to catalyze processes of revitalization in depopulated villages of rural Italy. 

Todd is a certified Rewilders Guide. He was first introduced to 3 Principle psychology in the 1990s and by the end of the decade was implementing this understanding within a spectrum of contexts, from project and community development in the arts to leading workshops in correctional facilities and domestic violence education centers. His initiatives have been supported by numerous regional and national foundations in the United States and, more recently, have been gaining attraction in Italy.  Todd is the founder of San Francisco’s Red Poppy Art house & the Mission Arts & Performance Project (US).

Todd describes growing up in a small town in the green mountains of Vermont as an immersive experience of summer lakes, hikes with his father to discover beaver dams in the backwoods, lectures from his mother about making sure to tell people you love them, and his sisters curating his wardrobe for junior high. Born into a ski family, He was on skis by age 2 and competing by age 7, and by his mid-teens was at a stage of pre-professional development, winning sponsorship with five major ski companies. But teen years often come with many trials, tribulations, and as life intervened Todd’s direction shifted away from athletics and into art and cultural studies. In college, Todd’s imagination was captured by charismatic teachers that believed in arts power to transform society as well as the individual. Among them were writers Mbulelo Mzamane and Zakes Mda of South Africa, and dancer/choreographer Baba Richard Gonzalez of Puerto Rico (by way of New York), whose teaching and life examples, Todd says, continue to remain vivid in his memory.  

It was during this same period that Todd was first introduced to the insights of Sydney Banks by Barbara Jordan at the University of Vermont, and then with Dicken Bettinger, whom he credits as playfully inducting him into the secret power of “not-knowing”. For another decade then onward Todd pursued workshops and seminars with many other well-known 3P practitioners such as George and Linda Pransky, Joe Bailey, Keith Blevens, eventually landing in a fellowship program with Roger Mills and Elsie Spittle in California. Most influential for him was a life-changing friendship he developed with 3P community educator Beverley Wilson Hayes, with whom he apprenticed across 5 years until he began to find his own style of teaching.

❃

Todd’s cultural projects and initiatives have won support from a diverse array of public and private foundations and institutions in the United States, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Sam Mazza Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, and Fleishhacker Foundation. His international exhibitions, presentations, performances, and commissions include ArtMarket/Budapest (HUNG), the Errol Barrow Center for Creative Imagination (Bridgetown, BRDO), La Noche and La Casona (Lima, PERU), Residencia el Otro Lado (Chiapas, MEX), Panama Theater Festival / Casa Góngora, (Panama City, PAN), Flying Under the Radar Festival of the Arts (US/BRZL), Mediterranea and Wunderkammer (Napoli, IT), Las Dalias (Ibiza, SP), Ishango Encounter (Goma, DRC), Atelier Güell Art Gallery (Barcelona, SP). In 2015, Todd was chosen for the YBCA list 100, an annual list of the 100 most creative minds generating vital questions that drive cultural discourse in the United States. And in 2022 he was invited by the Special Office of Reconstruction of the Crater Region (Usrc) to present at TEDx L’Aquila (L’Aquila, IT).