About Craig.
Craig Behenna is a screenwriter, director, and university educator working across film, theatre, and performer training. He is the Lecturer, Film Acting at the Elder Conservatorium of Music (University of Adelaide) and has taught screen acting and screenwriting in tertiary and professional settings, including honours-level and production-based training, including his work teaching screenwriting for John Yorke Story, the UK’s leading story education company.
Craig holds a First Class Master’s degree in Narrative Therapy from the University of Melbourne, supervised at the Dulwich Centre. His academic training emphasised narrative methodology, ethics, and post-constructivist approaches to identity and meaning-making, with a focus on qualitative, practitioner-centred inquiry.
Alongside academic and creative work, Craig draws on long-term contemplative practice as a disciplined training in attention and embodiment. In his teaching and research orientation, contemplative practice functions as a mode of inquiry into how performers relate to internal narration, judgement, and creative choice in real time. He is undertaking training as a Dharma teacher in the Thai Forest Insight tradition with extensive supervision and support from Insight Meditation Institute, Australia.
All of Craig’s work is concerned with how learning environments, institutional cultures, judgement, expectations and criticism shape creative agency and identity over time—and how practice-based methods can strengthen creators’ agency in their work and support sustainable creative careers.
If you’re looking for help with a particular creative project and you’d like to know more about my specific development and coaching work in that world, you can read more about that here.
We May Be A Good Fit If:
You want to talk about the deep questions, not have surface conversation.
We’ll often look at your whole body/mind experience.
All of your mental/psychological/emotional/physiological functions – your emotions, body sensations, thoughts, imagination, intuition and intellect – can show you the way in combination.
I’ll offer exercises and practices to take us deeper into the heart of the question you’re working with. The closer we get to the source, the closer you come to the insight and transformation.
You want to work with someone who’s invested in doing the work with you.
We’ll pause and look deeply at the stories that have shaped your life to this point. We’ll take our time to do this, spending time to see the deeper origins of these stories and how they play in your life.
As one of my teachers says, we’ll slow down to speed up.
Looking deeply at one aspect of a question or a story you bring to a session can open much deeper insights into what you bring to your work, your vision, how and what you can see in your life. That’s the gold of this work.
My Qualifications
I’m an emerging Dharma teacher in the Insight tradition through the Insight Meditation Institute Australia. I trained in Narrative Therapy (MA first class, University of Melbourne), as a Meditation and Mindfulness teacher (Zenways, Zendo Kai, U.K.) and as a Psychosynthesis coach (Synthesis Center, San Francisco).
My approach draws on:
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Mindfulness and Buddhist psychology
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Narrative therapy and coaching
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Psychosynthesis and Internal Family Systems
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Creative process and embodied awareness