Part biography, part live performance, “Beauty Is Embarrassing” tells the irreverent and inspiring story of this one-of-a-kind visual artist and raconteur. Produced and Directed by Neil Berkeley.

For over 30 years, three-time Emmy Award-winning Wayne White has made an indelible mark on the creative world--you may remember the larger-than-life animated puppets on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” As a designer, painter, puppeteer, sculptor, and musician, White created images and ideas that are an integral – yet sometimes subconscious – part of the pop culture lexicon. To this day, he still gets up every morning to do the only thing his body and mind were made to do…create. Whether the world acknowledges it or not..

BEAUTY IS EMBARRASSING: For two years, filmmaker Neil Berkeley traveled with White tracing White’s career from an underground cartoonist in New York’s East Village to his big break as a designer, puppeteer, animator and voice-over actor on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”; children’s shows like “Beakman’s World”; and music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins (“Tonight, Tonight”) and Peter Gabriel (“Big Time”): followed by a dark period of struggle. Yet, as Wayne explains in the film, there are sometimes second acts in life that take us to new heights – without compromise. At its core, Beauty Is Embarrassing shows what it takes for one uniquely talented, profanely hilarious, and utterly uncompromising artist to make it in America.

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and the new memoir In the Body of the World, discusses the female body and the world’s responsibility to protect it with Jody Williams, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her work banning landmines.  Williams’ memoir, My Name is Jody Williams, promotes civil society's power to help change the world. These two remarkable women discuss activism, their collaboration on ending violence against women, and bringing women together through the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict and One Billion Rising. 

Tom Drury's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Mississippi Review. He is the author of The Driftless Area, The Black Brook, and Hunts in Dreams. Drury was raised in Iowa and lives with his wife and daughter in California.