TheArtOfYes – An Evening With Josephine Forsberg!

We are happy to share a talk with Josephine Forsberg with the permission of JOHN PORUBSKY who recorded this footage in Chicago on November 6th, 1998. The Q&A meeting was initiated through the Players Workshop in Chicago.

Josephine Raciti Forsberg, known as “Jo”, was an actress, director, producer and most importantly, she was a pioneer teacher of improvisation. She was hired by Paul Sills and Viola Spolin to join the original Second City in 1959 as the female understudy and Spolin’s teaching assistant. Jo became an expert in improvisational techniques for the theater and by the mid 1960s she had taken over most of Spolin’s and Sills’s classes. From the early 1960s she taught thousands of people, training many of them for The Second City stage. These included Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Betty Thomas, Shelley Long, George Wendt, David Mamet, and Robert Townsend.

Read more about Jo Forsberg in the article written by her son: https://forsbergfilm.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/a-brief-history-of-josephine-forsberg-and-the-players-workshop-of-the-second-city/

Read about JO FORSBERG on

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Forsberg

also here: https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-improv-pioneer-jospehine-forsberg-dies-20111003-column.html

and here https://douggoodkindcreativity.com/josephine-forsberg-improv-mother/

and here https://www.playersworkshoponline.com/history

Enjoy watching! Special thanks to John Porubsky. @John Porubsky 1998 Clip edited by

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