Kim Clark

Kim Clark (born April 6, 1959) was a creative professional active in film, television, and live performance.

He is a businessman and community leader in Three Oaks, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois where he had lived for the past 15 years with his partner David Fink.

Their Michigan-based creative efforts having been featured in The New York Times.

Clark is also an ethicist who specializes in poverty and documentary filmmaking, an expert pipe organ builder, and full-time teacher at DePaul University.

Clark was a featured speaker at the Chicago Tribune 's Printer's Row Book Fair (2001) along with Sheldon Patinkin and Saturday Night Live cast member Tim Kazurinsky.

The trio were described by the Chicago Sun Times columnist Bill Zwecker as "Second City Improv Comedy Legends."

From 2001-2003, Clark served as Artistic Director and Educational Director at the Chicago Center for Performing Arts.

While there, he contributed to the Players Workshop masters classes, teaching Writing, Directing, On-Camera Technique and other classes.

An avid traveller for much of his life, Clark held a longtime interest in the Galapagos Islands, culminating in a residency on San Cristobal Island beginning in the summer of 2005.

Invited by the Galapagos Marine Ecology team at the University of Arizona, Clark, along with a group of 12 secondary and post-secondary teachers, worked with residents of several island communities to teach English to local school children.

Clark and Karen Ford-Manza Tompson, former Executive Director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Kansas and current Executive Director at Arizona Family Planning Council, co-authored a work regarding tectonic plate movement which was later reviewed by Rice University Staff (Linked below) The paper was entitled "The Geology and Vulcanology of the Galapagos Islands".

For several years, Clark taught screenwriting and ethics part-time at DePaul University's School of Cinema and Digital Media before accepting a full-time position with the university's College of Communications.

There, he teaches Documentary Production, Ethics in Cinema and Gaming, and Media Ethics.

As a faculty member, he created and sponsored an extra-curricular creative writing workshop for students called Acting Out.

The workshop's goal was to create and polish scripts that could then be optioned for free by the school's production-focused students.

Baritone Nathan Gunn, arguably the most in demand male singer in the world (Newsweek) sang under the Harbor Arts organization in 2008.

In Spring 2009 they featured New York Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Isola Jones, who has often been paired with Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo.

Clark serves on the Board of Writers in the Heartland — a residency program in Central Illinois founded to nurture emerging and established writers.

Their mission is to provide a tranquil environment conductive to artistic production and intellectual exchange.

In 2010, Clark partnered with Patricia Werhane, formerly the Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics at Darden, to plan a new venture.

She now holds a joint appointment at Darden and at DePaul University, where she is Wicklander Chair in Business Ethics and Director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics.

Her latest book is Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships with Routledge.

This team is creating global poverty awareness and preparing to send a team to produce and direct documentary film projects to raise public awareness of micro-lending in Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh segment of the project begins with IIRD (Institute of Integrated Rural Development), an NGO with a stated mission to create a model of rural development that can be replicated in any area of the Bangladesh - one that will facilitate the creation of the strong society.

The project's success thus far has led to an expansion of the project into other topics and locations, such as wage theft, the effects on families for incarcerating parents for non-violent crimes, and examinations of other international models of poverty solution in Tanzania and Haiti.

Clark is also a frequent speaker at international ethics conferences.

Recent presentations include: "Video and Pedagogy" for the International Society of Business, Economics and Ethics, in Warsaw, Poland, "The Many Facets of Trust" with Patricia Werhane, Laura Hartman, and David Bevan for the European Business Ethics Network in Trento, Italy, and "Documenting Solutions to World Poverty" at the 10th EABIS Colloquium (hosted by the Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg University).

Clark is the president of Harbor Arts, a Michigan Not-for-profit which has been responsible for dozens of public performances every year, and has featured new artists as well as some of the most popular performers in the world.

Kim passed away April 19, 2018.

Clark received a Bachelor of Science degree in applied psychology from Loyola University Chicago and a diploma in Christian education from the Moody Bible Institute,

Clark began his professional career in banking and marketing.

Over the course of several years, Clark served as Assistant Vice President at Chicago Cosmopolitan Bank, Executive Vice President of the consulting firm Telestudies, Associate Creative Director at Young & Rubicam and as a partner in Lakeside Management, Inc.

Clark has held simultaneous offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

His longtime writing partner Steve Zacharias wrote the definitive comedy Revenge of the Nerds.

Together, he and Clark have written and produced new works while fostering young writers in screenwriting careers.

For several years, Clark crafted, and later headed, the writing program for The Second City Training Center.

Students and educating colleagues include well-known SNL/EMMY writer Joe Kelly, Conan O'Brien staff writer Brian Stack, Daily Show writer Allison Sliverman , Kevin Dorff, Seth Meyers, Horatio Sanz, Amy Poehler and many others.

While teaching and developing the program, Clark's collaborative and writing partner was Second City improv guru Martin de Maat.

Their work in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago redefined teaching, comedic ethical value, tone and manner for a generation of students.

Among de Maat's most notable quotes were "no one will follow you down the road if you are holding a banner that reads 'onward toward mediocrity'" and "You are pure potential."