DUTCH INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLING CENTRE
ABOUT US
Let's share stories, here is ours.
Our mission at DISC is to provide quality courses and a friendly learning environment. We focus on empowering people by providing the necessary tools and knowledge to help reach their goals. With our uniquely positive learning approach, participants can begin applying their new skills after just one course.
Meet The Team
Michael Driebeek van der Ven
Founding Director & Master Storyteller
Connor McMullen
Story Engineer
Francine de Graaf
Director & Master Storyteller
Michael:
I grew up in a 400 year old house. It had been an Inn, a Court of Justice, a Concert Hall and a home. It is said that Louis Napoleon stopped at the Inn once and one of his soldiers died in a fight with the locals. They buried him under a flat stone in our garden, opposite the ‘french windows’…
Stories were everywhere, all around me and they were gladly shared by my parents; from ancestral knights that lost their castle, to a maid that lost her foot; every life mattered and every story was worth telling.
After reading Law at Leiden University and graduating from The Actor’s Studio in The Hague, a friend took me to ‘A Christmas Carol’ by a man named Ashley Ramsden. It reminded me of when I was 7 years old and how I had built a stage on top of the henhouse in the back of my parents’ garden. There I had started telling simple stories to the children in the neighbourhood.
In 2013 I graduated as Master Storyteller at the International School of Storytelling in the UK and founded DISC. I connected with Terra on top of Table Mountain in South Africa and with Francine at the café around the corner from my house. I feel so blessed working with these two wonderful people.
CONNOR:
Connor is the resident millennial at DISC, who is always pushing the boundaries of how technology and stories can come together. Connor has lived, worked and studied as an expat for ten years in Germany, India, and The Netherlands. He began the journey as an aersospace engineering, coordinating project teams and designing processes and components for the automotive and aerospace industry. Feeling like he wanted to be part of something bigger, Connor spent two years in TU Delft’s Engineering and Policy Analysis program, studying how to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to the wicked problems the world faces.
His thesis combined system dynamics and storyteller, testing how various forms of communication deliver messages about complex problems to the audience. Since then he has worked as analyst and storyteller in Netherlands and beyond, helping people and organisations better understand their own stories and how to share them. He most often works in the wonderful world of mythology and spontaneous storytelling, and especially loves to design, host, and play storytelling games. You can find out more about my work at
Francine:
Years ago I saw a storytelling performance, 'A Christmas Carol', by storyteller Ashley Ramsden. I was hanging on his every word. I found out, that he was the founder of The International School of Storytelling in the UK. “Wait a minute”, I thought, “there is a school where you can learn how to tell stories???”
I signed up for a beginner’s course and there my passion for storytelling was born. I took another course, and another one. I was so hungry for stories, I signed up for the full-time 3 month course, where I learned sooo much and made friends forever.
I love to tell traditional folktales, myths and creation stories. Those ancient stories, passed on from generation to generation, move me and touch me deeply. They might or might not be true, but those stories carry their wisdom and tell me the truth. About myself, about the people around me and the challenges in our lives today. That is why I love to relate myths to events that happened in my own life.
Apart from being a storyteller, I am a language teacher too. In my lessons I use stories for listening, speaking and reading. Stories are great teachers for building vocabulary and building confidence in speaking.
In my daily life, stories are all around me. I tell them, read them, practice them and listen to them and their great wisdom.