Ancilla Schmidhauser

The well-known storyteller, trainer and facilitator, sparring partner and author supports people and organizations in the process of discovering and shaping their own story potential to empower others and change the world.

Dorian Iten

Dorian draws, paints, sculpts, and teaches. He hosts weekly feedback sessions where artists from around the world gather to draw and  develop their skills. A pioneer in the field of online art education, Dorian most recently served as a program director at Barcelona Academy of Art in Spain.

2004, Dorian has founded KUNSTpause, now an established annual exhibition for young artists in Switzerland. 

His link to Beyond Storytelling lies in his contributions to the Story Camp 2022. A highly sensitive and thoughtful person, he brings an open, creative, and healing energy to the groups and individuals he works with.

Astrid Kirchhoff

Astrid Kirchhoff is a systemic narrative organizational developer. She loves opening up spaces for thinking, resonance and the future when it comes to understanding complex systems.

For Hummingbirds.biz, she helps companies and organizations create a place for collaboration and co-creation where people fill the space in listening and telling their everyday stories. This multi-perspective approach helps to rediscover existing knowledge and negotiate possible scopes of action with each other.

Her expertise stems from her role as a brand strategist in international network agencies, her time as owner of an agency for branding and communication and her experience as a systemic-narrative organizational developer and facilitator in a 100% agile managed company.

Sen Zhan

Sen is the host and producer of the podcast Beyond Asian: Stories of the Third Culture, where she helps her guests retrace the events of the past to empower the present, spanning themes of transcultural identity, intergenerational trauma, and the diverse understandings of belonging and home. 

A lifelong storyteller, Sen believes that when we share our histories, we retrieve the lost threads that lead us back to ourselves. Through retracing our memories, we draw the throughlines of meaning that lead us from the past to the present and draw us forward to the future. 

Intertwined with the narrative explorations of her podcast, Sen brings in creative writing and poetry to share inspiration in the smallest of moments - a glance, a certain posture of the body, a micro-scene on a street corner. 

Sen was born in China, raised in Canada, and currently lives in an intentional community in Berlin. She loves thinking and experimenting with the future of human connection.

The Great Turning: the powerful story of our time

Our current perception of reality can be described through the lens of three different stories of power. The story of Business as usual tells us that there is little need to change the way we live. The story of Great Unraveling draws attention to the disasters that Business as Usual has been causing. Finally, the story of the Great Turning focuses on the emergence of new and creative human responses to the challenges of our time.

In this Workshop, I invite you to dive into the powerful realm of the Great Turning.  After a short theoretical exploration of Joanna Macy’s “Work that reconnects”, we will inform our minds and bodies by experiencing our present lives within larger contexts of time. We will perform a Deep Time ritual in which present people will encounter people from the seventh generation in the future.

Together we will co-create a space in which we can feel the power of acting like ancestors of future generations. We will reflect on our experience and on how we can embody and translate it into our daily lives.

Storydevelopment in an Agile Leadership Journey

Agility is not only about tools and skills, but more importantly about an agile mindset leaders need to develop. To be able to create a compelling Story of Change is key to transformation.  Ellen Herb developed with Jaana Rasmussen and other experts a Leadership Training programme that has been running successfully in a German Company for 3 years. In their workshop, Ellen and Jaana will first talk about the programme as a case for enabling leaders to change mindset and truly develop agile thinking. In the practical part, participants will develop their own story of development and/or transformation with guidance of Ellen and Jaana in a playful, agile way.

Mythic Seduction: Mythological structures of cinematic narration

Cinema can be defined as a medium of seduction. Narrative cinema confronts us with situations, decisions and narratives that might appear disturbing in real life. Yet we are willingly accept this cinematic seduction and enjoy where it might lead us.

In the heart of this cinematic seduction lies the mythic narrative. Mythology is an endless field of inspiration for screen writers to find archetypical and highly effective plotlines, quest models and character prototypes. Especially within Hollywood cinema this mythical substructure is regularly used to huge effect. At the same time mythology reflects society and can be used as a pattern to analyze cinematic narratives.

The master class ‘Mythic Seduction’ will define the terms mythology and seduction within the context screen writing and comment on mythology based theories by Joseph Campbell, Roland Barthes and others. Finally the affirmative and the critical mytho-poetical approach will be discussed along a choice of film examples.

Embodiment journey to the power of narratives

Welcome to a co-creative workshop in which the depth of our own thinking and action logic becomes tangible in terms of the narratives of power awareness and self-mastery.

After a short theoretical exploration regarding the  "Ego-Development-Profile", we invite you to a deep embodiment journey via ‘Systemic Constellation Work’  - in order to explore and sense the stages of Ego-Maturation in relation to its underlying thinking and action logic.

With our senses and bodies we enter the ‘knowing fields’ by the Systemic Constellation and explore the collective wisdom behind the Ego-Development-Stages.

We discover the stories of power - inwardly and outwardly – behind each Ego-Development stage. We transfer the insights to our personal and professional journey as storytellers. We draw conclusions from the findings and transfer them to the transformation work as storytellers.