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For more than two decade Frankie Lee has been providing the foundation for the greater
connectivity that is so much needed today in this world where six-and-a-half billion people are challenged
to move beyond "us and them" and rise up to our higher humanity.
Through the two powerful alliances she formed - A Circle of Women in 1991 and The Art of
LIVING Coalition in 1996 - she has served as a torchbearer for a new social consciousness,
impulsing hundreds to actively co-create and thousands more to actively participate in large
and small community-based gatherings, media projects, social actions and networks of
relationship.
Aware, as the Dalai Lama (who is the subject of her first Artist of LIFE documentary portrait)
states, that, "A genuine change must first come from within the individual, before he or she
can make significant contributions to humanity," Frankie Lee has dedicated her life to this
purpose - refining herself to fulfill the powerful leadership role she steps into today as the
front person for the Coalition and host of the ground breaking global television series she
created The Art of LIVING - A Mystery School for the 21st Century.
The show, together with the rest of her innovative participatory media and work with
TAOLiving Coalition, is a synthesis of her three decades on the forefront of communications, experiential
learning, the media and human consciousness. Frankie Lee's personal journey brought her in
touch with a great many remarkable people to whom she now refers as artists of life - from
pioneers in brain-mind research to practitioners of centuries-old traditions which have enduring
relevance today. She saw a story unfolding - one of promise and of hope - that was
little evidenced in the media but which she made the
commitment to contextualize and make accessible.
Frankie Lee was born in the New York suburb of Bronxville,
and raised around the media - often researching and illustrating her school
reports from issues of Time and Life magazines which her marketing
executive dad brought home from Time Inc., and attending her first live television broadcast at age 10,
courtesy of a neighbor who worked at NBC.
Her interest in people and what moves them was well in evidence when her high school
Spanish class traveled to Spain and her curiosity sparked her to walk around the plane
interviewing people regarding their stories. It led Frankie Lee to identify herself as a global
citizen early in life and to major in Sociology at Northwestern University.
At 19 she was a passenger in a car accident which broke her back but progressed her ability
to look beyond the surface appearance where many people stop. Her Senior year, while
participating in Northwestern's pioneering Community Studies program in England, Frankie Lee
wrote an early precursor to her "art of living" model called, "Learning Through Living."
Frankie Lee began her career in the original programming department at Home Box Office in
1976, when many of today's leading executives were stirring the pot in the new medium of
cable television. Her love of people, the arts and entertainment, were the impetus for her
going into public relations - first at Ruder & Finn, then Barbara Brass & Associates in New York,
and on to ICPR and Stan Rosenfeld & Associates in Los Angeles, where she represented studio
releases and prime-time television shows, leading filmmakers, actors and composers.
When her client Giorgio Moroder's score for MIDNIGHT EXPRESS won both the Golden Globe
and Academy Award, her work came to the attention of producer David Puttnam. Puttnam
retained Frankie Lee to take care of his public relations in the U.S. and connected her with the
British PR firm Dennis Davidson Associates, where she became a director of the company.
While at DDA, Frankie Lee designed the national release for The Who's film Quadrophenia,
complete with a Mod-Rocker Halloween eve party at the
Mudd Club in TriBeCa.
In 1981, at the age of 27, she was appointed Director of Public Relations for the Samuel Goldwyn Company
where she oversaw all areas of national and international distribution, production, corporate and foundation public
relations, at a time when the company became highly regarded as a leading independent film company.
Frankie Lee's interest in human excellence lead her into fascinating new terrain starting in 1983. She collaborated -
writing and developing workshops - with Dr. Gregory Raiport, a former sports psychologist for the USSR Olympic
team, who was using state-of-the-art techniques to train US athletes for the 1984 Olympics, and heighten performance
in business.
While keeping one foot in PR, representing the leaders in IMAX, MacGillivray Freeman Films, and projects such as the JazzAmerica series for PBS,
her inquiry into what works and how to make things better was becoming more and more
impassioned. Under the guidance of such leaders in the field as Richard Bandler, Anthony
Robbins and especially Dr. Scout Cloud Lee, Frankie Lee immersed herself in the exploration
of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), an advanced social science developed by Bandler and
John Grinder in the 70's to enhance communications and model successful techniques for
living.
After meeting the Native American actor and Cree medicine man Will Sampson in 1985
on the set of POLTERGEIST II, where she was the unit publicist, Frankie
Lee developed an interest in ritual and the wisdom practices of other
cultures, which would bring her together with indigenous people
throughout the Pacific. Will, who is best remembered as the big Indian,
the strong, silent presence in the film ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO's
NEST, became her mentor and encouraged Frankie Lee to attend a
Native American spiritual gathering in Canada, called by the elder
Albert Lightning.
Will said there would be, "2,000 people of many different traditions, coming together to share
their wisdom, speaking of the prophesies, this time and our part in it." It was the kind of billing
a city girl needed to drive thousands of miles to turn down a little dirt road where she would fast
for four days without food or water. While there were only 150 people who actually attended
the gathering, because Frankie Lee took the first step, she has met the 2,000 since, many of
whom are her friends and collaborators today in The Art of LIVING Coalition.
Through the years, Frankie Lee related her experiences in articles published in the US and
Australia, and her "Frankly Speaking" column in New Paradigm Digest as well as compiling the
rich storehouse of audio and video for The Art of LIVING media. She lead and produced her
own original events and those for and with esteemed colleagues, all the while living intimately
in community and delving more and more deeply in her exploration of the Self.
Frankie Lee was privileged to form close associations with several
of the true innovators in human consciousness: Neurophysiologist
Dr. John Lilly, who was the first to describe the brain as a "human
biocomputer," pioneered interspecies communications with
dolphins and invented the flotation tank, at whose home she lived
in 1988. Lou Mobley who introduced executive development at
IBM, the first program of its kind; Yogiraj Vetathiri Maharashi,
a guru in the Tamil Siddha tradition of India who created the
Simplified Kundalini Yoga (SKY) system; Star Newland, the
developer of "language sculpting," a new technology intended to
help people create more coherent realities through the conscious use of language; Al Joy, an
innovator in the cosmology of human evolution called "Solar Psychology," who is her partner in
the ground-breaking Connectivity Conferences they've designed to support people in affirming
our essential connection and moving to increasingly higher levels of creativity.
Frankie Lee is a living example who represents the ability to
move beyond the fear-based world that sees separation as
reality and embrace a loving and harmonious world where
life is celebrated and freedom is defined "in relationship
with." Since there are six-billion people living up-close-and-personal
on the planet, she suggests looking for what is
right about this - an opportunity to put an end to our denial
of there being such a thing as "them" or such a place as
"over there," and take the next step up in our human
evolution by working together for our common future.
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