Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

Writing is my passion, poetry and prose have been my home since childhood. However, I found a love of independent film that transformed into my ultimate calling of becoming an auteur. In each case I find the space to explore the intersections of the interior Black woman and name what was meant to stay unnamed: our tenderness, our survival, our resilience.

Where do you find inspiration?

In my late mother’s kitchen, in comment sections where strangers reveal what culture demands of them, in emergency rooms where Black patients are brutalized, in old photographs and older silences. I find inspiration in the language of grief and the dance of summer fireflies. My imagination is fed by lost matriarchs, queer survival, medical advocacy, metal and jazz on replay, and the small daily evidence of ordinary people bringing the extraordinary to strangers.

What would you do with $25,000?

In 2023, I lost my mom, my foundations, to cancer. In 2024, I nearly died, twice. In ‘25, I began fighting for my life and the reclamation of my body. Each event brought me to the brink. I found my way back to my art through the notes app on my phone, and brought myself back to life. $25K would let me step from under medical trauma and build PhoenixFilmHouse into a sustainable production home, finish The Diva’s Daughter and Love Letters from Exile. It would mean space for breath and creation.