Frederick Ebert is a theatre artist and educator whose decades in design, direction, and teaching converge in The Book of Lenses.
Originally from Cody, Wyoming, he began his studies at Northwest College in Powell before earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Wyoming and a master's from Washington State University, where his graduate project explored the nature of illusion and how it is brought to the stage — a question that would resurface, transformed, in the pages of this book. He went on to pursue MFA studies at Brandeis University.
His career carried him across the American theatre and, just as formatively, across cultures. At Goucher College he worked as a designer, technical director, and instructor. As director of theatre at Northland Pioneer College, he built a program from an old mechanic's garage into a thriving department, leaving behind the plans for the dedicated theatre later constructed there. A period away from the academy — learning sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship while building a business — added a practical, worldly counterpoint to his artistic training.
Then he returned to where he had begun. For fourteen years he taught at Northwest College, in a rural community with little access to the wider world, and made it his purpose to bring that wider world in. His cross-cultural experience became seed for students who went on to do remarkable things — a give-back he had long promised himself, and the accomplishment he values most.
Retiring in 2021, he traded a house in town for an old farm cottage and turned to a long-postponed inquiry into perception, belief, and experience. Following the questions where they led, he gathered years of notes that gradually coalesced into The Book of Lenses — a structured oracle built to help others shift perspective on what matters most to them. He publishes it under his own imprint, Allow for Many, and writes from Powell, Wyoming.