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Nathan Vass

Nathan Vass
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Nathan Vass is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and author by day, and a Metro bus driver by night, where his community-building work has been showcased on TED, NPR, The Seattle Times, KING 5 and landed him a spot on Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the 35 Most Influential People in Seattle. He has shown in over forty photography shows is also the director of nine films, six of which have shown at festivals, and one of which premiered at Henry Art Gallery. His book, The Lines That Make Us, is a Seattle bestseller and 2019 WA State Book Awards finalist.
Saturday, Oct. 12, 2019, 7 – 9 p.m.Seattle Central Library, Level 1: Microsoft AuditoriumFree The title kind of says it all. It's like the Oscars, except, of course, for all the ways it isn't: you don't have to pay, it's not long, and there aren't any commercial breaks.  I'm inviting you...
This post is a care package for my colleagues and anyone else who was scared or otherwise put off by a recent spate of exaggeration in some recent newsmedia depictions of Metro buses as dangerous places. Neither of this week's broadcasts emphasized they were: Actually sourcing their video from a...

A Bus Driver Kind of Mind

Why do I love scruffiness, when I am not scruffy? Because these are the strangers who are consistently nicest to me, who treat me plainly, as an equal and fellow human. We feel the leading-edge bruises of the immediacy of life together, and we don't make a big thing about...
It all started so innocently. Each person meant well, but each had a stress inside them, a bitterness, that they turned on the others without a second thought. The first person got on long before the ride would become unpleasant, well before they knew they'd be the locus point around...
Hello, Urbanist friends. In the wake of my book being nominated for the Washington State Book Award, I'm having another book talk at the Greenwood Senior Center, on the afternoon of Thursday the 29th. Why there, you ask?  Because they're a swell bunch. They allowed me to rent their rooms for my...

Nathan’s TED Talk

https://youtu.be/bxw2P7WbRKE What does it mean to be urbanized? What does living in a city require of us in terms of social engagement, and to what degree could we be benefitting more than we are now? Click to watch my recent speech about what strangers can give us that friends et al can't! A...
Never in a million years. That's what I thought when we applied for this thing a year ago. A pipe dream. You apply for it for the same reason you apply for Ivy League colleges, the Green Card lottery, or Oscar-qualifying film festivals. It's not actually about achievingthe summit of...
It was the most elegant piece of furniture I'd ever seen dumped at a bus stop. How exciting!  "Hang on a second, I just need to look at this awesome chair," I explained to my companion inside the bus. It was midnight. You can do stuff like that during the...