Professor Eric Trules, Lecturer at the University of Southern California (USC)in Los Angeles for 19 years, is an artist-educator who has been active in the literary and performing arts for over 30 years. Beginning as a modern dancer and choreographer in Chicago, he was founder and director of New York City's resident clown troupe, which was funded by the American government and traveled to Holland, Switzerland, and France in 1979. Since moving to LA in 1982, Trules has been a professional actor, director, screenwriter, poet, documentary filmmaker, and academic. He premiered his feature length documentary film, "The Poet and the Con", in Nyon, Switzerland in 1998, and he was a Fulbright Scholar in Malaysia in 2002. His specialty is "solo performance", or the writing and performing of personal, autobiographical monologues, and he has twice taken his own one-man shows to the Edinburgh Arts Festival, where he was "Short-listed" for best show of the Fringe. Trules has been at USC since 1986 where he has had a distinguished career, being one of the most popular teachers on campus and winning many prestigious awards including the Phi kappa Phi "Faculty Recognition Award" in 1999. In 2004 Trules was invited to present the distinguished "What Matters to Me and Why" lecture at USC.