What advice would you give young Black women who are looking to enter the creative space of television and film?
Artists are here to disrupt. It is a business. It can be very fruitful, but artists have the responsibility to lead forward. They must be reflective of who we are and where we need to go. So, I would say my advice is [to ask yourself] who are you and what do you want to say in that expression through your art? What are you feeding back to the people? Because you can set us back with your art, or we can move forward. So, I would tell them to ask themselves, who are you, what do you want to say, and why?
How do you find your purpose?
We lose a lot of our best artists because of the need for our families and for ourselves to have a quantifiable salary that says success. But I think we need to start teaching our families and the villages around them and artists themselves how to create a life, and a safe space to be an artist. I think that one of our gifts as Black people is that we know how to make one dollar out of 15 cents. With that skill that we have, we can help our children figure that out. And the child should know they have a responsibility to give back. That will lead [to] the purpose of … strategizing, and creating a plan for that artist to be protected and to thrive in the world.
