AUTHOR INTERVIEWS heard on Morning Edition with A. Martinez
Are animals creative? Carol Gigliotti’s new book shows you just how creative they are. November 24, 20224:55 AM ET

The Creative Lives of Animals

Winner of the 2023 Nautilus Gold Book Award in Animals and Nature

Most of us view animals through a very narrow lens, seeing only bits and pieces of beings that seem mostly peripheral to our lives. However, whether animals are building a shelter, seducing a mate, or inventing a new game, animals’ creative choices affect their social, cultural, and environmental worlds.

The Creative Lives of Animals offers readers intimate glimpses of creativity in the lives of animals, from elephants to alligators to ants. Drawing on a growing body of scientific research, Carol Gigliotti unpacks examples of creativity demonstrated by animals through the lens of the creative process, an important component of creative behavior, and offers new thinking on animal intelligence, emotion, and self-awareness. With examples of the elaborate dams built by beavers or the lavishly decorated bowers of bowerbirds, Gigliotti provides a new perspective on animals as agents in their own lives, as valuable contributors to their world and ours, and as guides in understanding how creativity may contribute to conserving the natural world. Presenting a powerful argument for the importance of recognizing animals as individuals and as creators of a healthy, biodiverse world, this book offers insights into both the established and emerging questions about the creativity of animals.

Cover Photo @ Melissa Groo


PRAISE

“Carol Gigliotti’s The Creative Lives of Animals deconstructs our conceit that humans alone are capable of emotion, creativity and synthetic thinking. The author joyfully perforates the rigid tenets of behavioral science with vivid stories from the fresh edge of research. It is good to live in a time when human self-reference is finally yielding to the undeniable evidence of magnificent animal minds.” — Julie Zickefoose ― Wall Street Journal


Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and A Dog’s World with Jessica Pierce.
“The Creative Lives of Animals makes its strongest case when advocating a revision of how to think about, and act towards, animals. Ms. Gigliotti points out that humans are only one of millions of species on Earth. She suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism in favor of recognition that animals are individuals with complicated, powerful, creative lives of their own.” ― The Economist


John DoeCompany Name
“An illuminating account of creativity in the wild. Gigliotti makes a solid case that humans have a lot to learn about the creatures that they share the planet with, and that much of what scientists previously thought was uniquely human isn’t. Fans of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal will be pleased.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred)


John DoeCompany Name
“Gigliotti builds the case that animals of all types―from elephants to ants―are intelligent, albeit in ways that may manifest differently than humans, and they can communicate nuance, allowing individual behavioral innovation to spread through a community. Ultimately, her agenda is to seek greater empathy, value, and protection for animals by including them into a global creative force. This broad survey of creative animal behavior will appeal to artists of all types and to animal lovers.” ― Library Journal

John DoeCompany Name
“If you’ve ever purchased one of the many different types of ‘squirrel proof’ bird feeders, you can attest to the resourcefulness of animals. In this intriguing investigation of animal ingenuity, Gigliotti contemplates the novelty and meaning of creativity along with some essential elements, such as curiosity, flexibility, and persistence.” ― Booklist

John DoeCompany Name
“From playfully bowing puppies to seductively singing alligators, Carol Gigliotti combines examples from interviews with scientists and excerpts of previously published books in this delightful index of animal inventiveness.” — Fionna M. D. Samuels ― Scientific American

John DoeCompany Name

“The Creative Lives of Animals is a game-changer. Carol Gigliotti shows how important creativity –improvisation and invention–is in a wide variety of contexts including expressing different emotions, playing, socially communicating with others, courting, mating, and raising children, and designing and engineering animals’ homes. Easy-to-read and science-based, The Creative Lives of Animals will be of interest to a broad audience including researchers and non-researchers alike, and surely will change the ways in which humans view and treat the fascinating animals with whom we share our magnificent planet.” ― Marc Bekoff, author of Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do

John DoeCompany Name

“Gigliotti’s palpable love of the animal world is expressed in graceful and affecting prose… the author deserves praise for creating this beautiful prose paean to the other animals who inhabit our shared world.” — D. Altschiller, Boston University ― CHOICE

John DoeCompany Name
“Finely written. Gigliotti, tuned into nature and the lives of animals, offers a good model for the rest of us to follow, helping us see the world not from myopic humanism but from the perspective of animals. Implicitly, Gigliotti asks everyone and not just scientists to learn about the lives of animals in our shared ecosphere to which we are all tied with an equal fate.” — Gregory F. Tague ― Leonardo Reviews

John DoeCompany Name
In her marvelous book, Gigliotti reveals the astonishing depth and genius of animal creativity, demolishing a common view of animals as little more than robots mindlessly enacting the scripts given to them by Nature. Drawing on a century of ethological findings, the author shows how animals bring deep intelligence, emotions, and even an aesthetic sensibility to bear on their daily challenges. Animals are shown to be not mere ‘types,’ but creative individuals and artists of their own lives. This is the rare work that opens our eyes to worlds of experience and being that would otherwise remain hidden from us.” ― John Sanbonmatsu, author of Critical Theory and Animal Liberation

John DoeCompany Name
“The Creative Lives of Animals is smart, original, and well-written. Gigliotti topples one of the last remaining conceits about what distinguishes humans from nonhuman animals: the aptitude for creative expression and aesthetic appreciation. The Creative Lives of Animals is masterfully researched, and will surely make vital contributions to debates not only in animal studies but also in the philosophy of mind and even performance studies. At the same time, the writing sparkles, and the book overflows with stories so accessible and well-crafted that the book deserves wide readership. This is a work that has the potential to fundamentally change the way we think about animals–and ourselves.” ― Colin Jerolmack, author of The Global Pigeon

John DoeCompany Name
“If you doubt that other beings can create, prepare to be convinced otherwise. With a delightful combination of science and anecdote, Gigliotti explores a neglected facet of the inner lives of our fellow denizens of planet Earth. The result is a highly readable and accessible foray into the creative lives of animals.” — Jonathan Balcombe

John DoeCompany Name
“So many people are reluctant to admit that the species we share this planet with are also creative. Perhaps this book will change their minds. Eye-opening and fascinating.” — John Yunker ― EcoLit Books

John DoeCompany Name
“This broad survey of creative animal behaviour makes a compelling case that animals of all types (from insects to mammals) are capable of behavioural innovation and provides artists insight into their own creativity.” — Nathalie Atkinson ― The Globe and Mail


John DoeCompany Name
“Many songbirds are born without the ability to sing. So should those that learn ― and other animals ― be called creative? Carol Gigliotti interviews scientists who think they should be, and agrees with them. An animal activist, author and artist who has taught design and dynamic media, she defines creativity as a ‘dynamic process’ in which individuals generate ‘novel and meaningful behavior’ that might affect others at cultural, species and evolutionary levels.” — Andrew Robinson ― Nature


John DoeCompany Name

About the author

Carol Gigliotti is an author, artist, animal activist, and scholar whose work focuses on the reality of animals’ lives as important contributors to the biodiversity of this planet. She is Professor Emerita of Design and Dynamic Media and Critical and Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Design, Vancouver, BC. CANADA.

Her newest book, The Creative Lives of Animals, was published by the NYU Press (Nov. 2022)

This work challenges the current assumptions of creativity offering a more comprehensive understanding through recognizing animal creativity, cognition, consciousness, and agency.

She is the editor of the book, Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals and the author of numerous book chapters and journal essays on these topics. Her work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Sitka Center for the Arts, and Coppermoss, among others. Gigliotti is on several international advisory boards concerned either with media or animal studies. Gigliotti has a BSS in Performance Studies, an MFA in Printmaking, and a Ph.D. from the Advanced Computing Center of Arts and Design at The Ohio State University.

She now lives in Eugene, Oregon

Other Books and Book Chapters

Leonardo’s Choice, the book I edited on the implications and effects of genetic technologies on animals, contains essays from a wide range of authors, including philosophers, artists, art historians, biologists, architects, and experts in animal law.

My ideas on Critical animal studies (CAS) as a critical approach to human-animal relationships and explicitly committed to global justice for animals, humans, and the earth in Linda Kaloff’s wide-ranging Oxford Handbook on the growing area of Animal Studies.

An earlier book chapter on “the deep connections between the suppression and destruction of natural creativity–organic, ecological, and biological–and the corrosive effects of that destruction on sustained human creativity in Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology

Gigliotti, C. (Ed.). (2009) Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic technologies and animals. Dorchedt: Springer.

Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals is an edited collection of twelve essays and one dialogue focusing on the profound effect the use of animals in biotechnology is having on both humans and other species. Communicating crucial understandings of the integrated nature of the human and non-human world, these essays, unlike the majority of discussions of biotechnology, take seriously the impact of these technologies on animals themselves. This collection’s central questions revolve around the disassociation Western ideas of creative freedom have from the impacts those ideas and practices have on the non-human world.

Honored to be included in this Handbook edited by Linda Kaloff.

Gigliotti, C. (2017) “The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies.” in The Oxford Handbook Of Animal Studies, (Ed.) Linda Kaloff. Oxford University Press.

Critical animal studies (CAS) is a critical approach to human-animal relationships and explicitly committed to a global justice for animals, humans, and the earth. This essay argues that the global animal industrial complex, as well as the increasing global cultural push to eat meat, are inordinately causing calamitous current conditions of human-caused climate change and species extinction, as well as increasing poverty, hunger, disease, environmental damage and unprecedented animal misery and slaughter. Influenced by critical theory from the Frankfurt School and feminism, among other sources, CAS specifically critiques capitalism and globalization in its role in the domination of people, animals and the earth, but also sees the intersections of all oppression anywhere and for whatever reason as motivation for employing the powerful forces of compassion and social justice.

Educating artists
Very happy to be included in this wonderful book edited by Mel Alexenberg

Gigliotti, C. (2008) “Sustaining Creativity and the Loss of the Wild” In M. Alexenberg (Ed.) Educating Artists in a Digital Age: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science,Technology and Culture. Bristol, UK: Intellect Press/Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This chapter explores the deep connections between the suppression and destruction of natural creativity – organic, ecological, and biological – and the corrosive effects of that destruction on sustained human creativity. This exploration will include a discussion of various metaphoric approaches that are being used or might be used in new media art and design education to encourage creative solutions to both forms of destruction.