Debbie Millman

Can you talk about the two pieces?

You've talked about feeling safest as you were growing up in the woods, places that weren't surveilled.

Do you think your relationship to landscape began as a form of freedom?

At that stage of your life, you were planning on going into science.

What were you planning to do professionally at that point?

Your high school teacher arranged for you to attend an event with admissions officers from several college art programs.

And this resulted in your being awarded a scholarship to go to Carnegie Mellon's prestigious undergraduate art program.

And you said that when you got there, everyone else in the program had a baseline knowledge of art history, which you didn't have.

How did you catch up?

Any of these paintings that we see behind us in that portfolio.

So she changed her life.

That's incredible.

Do you have a sense of what made her cry?

It's incredible when adults reach out to people that they believe in, even when they might sense or know that the person themselves doesn't believe in what they're capable of.

I ordinarily don't talk too much about myself in interviews with others, but there is somebody in the audience I want to acknowledge who I found out was coming today.

Her name is Roz Goldfarb, and she changed my life back when I was in my early 30s and completely lost with nowhere to go.

And she believed in me.

And when we find people like that in our lives, I think it's important to acknowledge what that means.

Thank you, Roz.

In any case...