Gloria Orenstein

Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research began with a love of theatre, and her book The Theater of the Marvelous: Surrealism and the Contemporary Stage led to her meeting with Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington in the early seventies. Her second book, The Reflowering of the Goddess, studied the way women writers and artists of the seventies, eighties, and nineties explored the ancient ethos and mythos of pre-patriarchal civilization, when the centrality of the Great Mother Goddess was revered along with nature. These discoveries led to Orenstein’s co-creation of a pioneering conference at USC on Eco-feminism in 1987 and she co-edited the book that emerged from the conference, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Eco-Feminism. In 2018 she received The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus of Art of The College Art Association. A film on her life’s work, titled  Gloria’s Call, was made by four amazing women artists from the Woman’s Building of L.A  and has received awards at several film festivals and awaits distribution. Orenstein plans to follow the wisdom of the young people in Meiling Cheng’s piece “Pneuma” and work towards the regeneration of life on our planet to create a more sustainable, harmonious, conscious, and caring way of life for all the inhabitants both human and non-human on the Earth.