LINDA DURHAM
speaker • author • wanderer
Photo Credit: Two Girls Working:
Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki
Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki
Linda Durham, human rights advocate, adventurer, and author of Still Moving and The Trans-Siberian Railway Journey, an Art and Friendship Project, earned an advanced degree in contemporary art through a thirty-three-year immersion as a gallery owner and Art and Artist's consultant in one of the world’s top art markets—Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Born in Philadelphia, Durham is a lifelong journal writer, founder of the Wonder Institute (a visual- and performing-arts think tank and salon), lecturer, and workshop presenter who collects experiences and cultural encounters the way others collect souvenirs.
A former Manhattan Playboy Bunny in the 1960s, and mother of two world-traveling humanitarian children she talks to herself—onstage and off—and to the birds at her high-desert home, where she prizes her personal library almost as much as her freedom, her cats, dog, chickens, and the love of her life. The self-professed ageless quester recharges her inventive and spiritual batteries by wayfaring in faraway places.
She is currently at work on a new book, Naked Women: stripped and teased, a bold exploration of creativity, memory, aging, and identity, told through the lives of a few ancestors, several soul sisters, and four fictional women she might have become—had she chosen different paths.
Born in Philadelphia, Durham is a lifelong journal writer, founder of the Wonder Institute (a visual- and performing-arts think tank and salon), lecturer, and workshop presenter who collects experiences and cultural encounters the way others collect souvenirs.
A former Manhattan Playboy Bunny in the 1960s, and mother of two world-traveling humanitarian children she talks to herself—onstage and off—and to the birds at her high-desert home, where she prizes her personal library almost as much as her freedom, her cats, dog, chickens, and the love of her life. The self-professed ageless quester recharges her inventive and spiritual batteries by wayfaring in faraway places.
She is currently at work on a new book, Naked Women: stripped and teased, a bold exploration of creativity, memory, aging, and identity, told through the lives of a few ancestors, several soul sisters, and four fictional women she might have become—had she chosen different paths.
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A ranging, rich collage of memory and reflection. The author navigates the globe, and an uncertain career shift, recounting tales that occasionally feel born for the big screen, but are told with humility and authenticity. - Self Publishing Review |
Who do we become when we've lost the things that defined us?When Linda Durham shuttered her internationally acclaimed art gallery after thirty-three years, she found herself navigating a sea of bewilderment. Risk-taking had long been the tour de force of her life. But had she failed, or had she succeeded? Change always comes at a price.
Through delicious and dark, scintillating and salacious true tales of planned and accidental intersections with the exotic and quixotic, Durham pits her real self against her ideal self in a lifelong journey as serpentine as the Mobius strip her father made for her more than seven decades ago. On stage and off, Durham creates and is created by story. Raven spirit tattoos on both shoulders, wanderlust in her eyes, she danced in ceremony with tribal Kachin women, chanted "Free Gaza" from aboard the seized Audacity of Hope ship, was cured by a Voodoo priest in a Haitian cemetery, slogged through the tempestuous lands' end at Tierra del Fuego, and breathlessly summitted Kilimanjaro. Everywhere this around-the-world traveler wandered, she chased the ghosts of her own ignorance and arrogance, culled clarity from confusion, and dug herself out from the crushing numbness of defeat. Durham unabashedly pulls back the curtain on loves lost and found and on a life lived richly and openly amid fair fields and foreign wars, in places sacred and profane. Her incurable optimism gives inspiration and voice to the struggles of women worldwide, empowers those of us who feel derailed by a world out of control, and frees us to open the door to love. |
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