Draft:Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson (born April 13, 1968) is an American author, film-maker, and lecturer. She founded the International Bateson Institute to support the study of complexity in living systems, and she founded the Warm Data Labs to apply her research to public discourse.

Bateson achieved international recognition for her first book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles Circles: Framing through Other Patterns, (Triarchy Press, UK, 2016), selected by the Harvard Innovation Lab to help incoming students frame the challenges of social change.

Bateson is the daughter of Gregory Bateson, sister of Mary Catherine Bateson, and grand-daughter of genetics pioneer William Bateson. Her independent film about the life and work of her father, An Ecology of Mind, won the Gold Medal for best documentary at the Spokane Film Festival and the Audience Choice award for best documentary at the Santa Cruz Film Festival (2011), and earned the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology (2011).

She is an Associate of The Taos Institute; a Board Member of Human Systems Journal of Systemic Practice, the Institute for General Semantics, Board Member of the Capital Institute, Fellow of Lindisfarne Foundation; a member of the Club of Rome, Great Transition Foundation, and Human Potential Foundation; and has won the Sustainable Thompkins Ecology Award, and was the 2019 recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Her work incorporates themes of ecology, anthropology, cybernetics, communication theory, and social sciences. She describes her "trans-contextual" approach as an effort to answer the question: “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”

Early Life
Nora Bateson was born April 13, 1968 in Kailua, Hawaii. Her father Gregory Bateson, was an anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Gregory Bateson taught at Saybrook University in San Francisco and at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her mother Lois Cammack (born 1929), was a therapist and social worker. Her half sister Mary Catherine was 29 years older and had earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in Middle Eastern Studies. Nora grew up in Big Sur, living with her parents at Esalen Institute where her father often lectured. Public intellectuals, scientists, and political leaders such as California Governor Jerry Brown, frequented her home. When she was 12-years-old, her father died at the San Francisco Zen Center. She credits her father for instilling in her a deep curiosity and love for learning, particularly learning about the patterns of the natural world.

1986 Chapel Hill High School 1989-1991 Chaing Mai University, Thailand 1991 University California Santa Cruz, BA in Filmmaking and Southeast Asian Studies

Personal Life
In 1996 Nora Bateson married musician Daniel Brubeck, son of American jazz icon Dave Brubeck. They have two children, Sahra (born August 19, 1995) and Trevor (born April 5, 1997). The couple divorced in 2013. Bateson reacquainted with friend Mats Qwarfordt, and they were married in 2016. They now live in Larger Stockholm, Sweden, where Bateson conducts her work for the International Bateson Institute and Warm Data Labs.