Reinvention isn’t about starting over. It’s about listening—closely—to who you’re becoming.

In this episode of About Art, I speak with Lora Jakobsen about leadership before titles, creativity beyond the arts, and how community shapes both personal growth and professional impact. From her early background in the performing arts to her current work in climate tech at ZeroNorth, Lora’s journey is a powerful reminder that the skills we develop in one chapter often become the foundation for the next.

We talk about:

•Reinvention as an ongoing practice

• Why art should never feel intimidating

• Leadership rooted in presence, curiosity, and care

• The role of community in shaping meaningful work

• Creativity as a transferable life skill

This conversation is for anyone navigating change—and wondering what might be possible on the other side. Lora is Heidi Zuckerman’s sister.

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with actor Josh Zuckerman about creativity, vulnerability, and why art—at its best—helps us feel less alone.

Josh has worked professionally in film and television since his late teens, with an eclectic career that spans comedy, drama, and horror. He currently appears in the Paramount+ series School Spirits and previously starred as the lead in The CW’s Significant Mother. His film work ranges from comedies such as Sex Drive and Austin Powers: Goldmember to dramas including Oppenheimer, The Hottest State, and CBGB, as well as genre films like Feast. His television credits include The Offer, Hunters, Alaska Daily, Fatal Attraction, Boston Legal, House, NYPD Blue, Strange Angel, and 90210, among many others.

In their conversation, Heidi and Josh discuss:

•Growing up alongside art and creativity—and how it shaped his sense of self

•What acting has taught him about empathy, presence, and emotional risk

•How inhabiting other lives can deepen understanding and connection

•The difference between performing for validation and creating with purpose

•Why art, storytelling, and shared experience help us feel seen

This episode is also a personal one: Josh is Heidi’s brother, and their shared history brings an added layer of honesty, humor, and reflection to the conversation.

A 20-year veteran of leading entertainment and sports agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Joel Lubin is a Managing Director and Co-Head of the Motion Picture Group. Lubin represents many of the world’s most acclaimed talent, including Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, Chris Evans, Mahershala Ali, Vanessa Kirby, David Oyelowo, Jude Law, Andrew Garfield, Mark Rylance, Jon Bernthal, Charlize Theron, Sebastian Stan, Josh Brolin, Michelle Williams, Matthew Goode, James Corden, Hilary Swank, and Jeremy Renner, among others.  

An avid art collector, Lubin currently serves on the Board of Overseers for the Hammer Museum and the Board of Directors of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this conversation, Lubin and Zuckerman discuss how careers are built over time; the role of trust, risk, and intuition in representation; and what it means to advocate for artists at the highest level while navigating an industry shaped by scale, power, and change. They reflect on creative partnership, long-term thinking, and the parallels between collecting art and stewarding talent—both rooted in conviction, patience, and belief. 

Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Ghanaian parents. He is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Artist Fellowship, the 2023 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Spirit of the Dream Award, and previously served as the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union. He has received public commissions for the Highline, the NYC AIDS Memorial, MOCA Grand Avenue and the MTA’s Arts & Design program. Fordjour’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. A monograph of his work will be published by Phaidon in 2027.

He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia, earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work is held in the private and public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and The Royal Collection in London among others. He is the founder of the Contemporary Arts Memphis.

He and Zuckerman discuss his work, particularly his exhibition “Night Song,” identity, memory, and community, how art can evoke emotional responses and create shared experiences, his creative process, the importance of collaboration, his commitment to giving back to the community through his foundation in Memphis, and how art is life!

How can abstraction carry emotion, identity, and lived experience?

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with painter Katherine Bradford, whose luminous work bridges the personal, mythic, and communal. Bradford moved from Maine to New York in the 1980s as a single mother raising school-age twins and became part of the first wave of artists to shape the Williamsburg art community. After more than a decade navigating the Manhattan gallery world, her work has since been recognized internationally and is held in major museum collections.

Their conversation spans Bradford’s five-decade painting career, abstraction and figuration, color and process, studio practice, and the challenge of representing human emotion. They also discuss community, motherhood, the evolving art world, and why creativity remains fundamental to how we understand ourselves and one another.

This is a conversation about painting as a lifelong practice—and art as a deeply human act.

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, founder of ART X and ART X Lagos, the leading international art fair in West Africa. Through ART X, Peterside-Schwebig has played a pivotal role in positioning Lagos on the global cultural stage while remaining deeply committed to local communities and creative voices.

Their conversation explores the development of ART X Lagos; the importance of engaging both local and international audiences; connecting African artists and collectors; and supporting new generations of creatives through initiatives such as ART X Live!, the ART X Prize, and ART X Cinema. Together, they discuss artistic innovation across Africa, the power of cultural entrepreneurship, and how younger generations are shaping the future of art on the continent and beyond.

This is a conversation about building platforms, expanding narratives, and reimagining what global cultural leadership can look like.

What does it mean to read fashion—not just as style, but as culture, politics, and lived experience?

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with designer Carla Fernández, founder of the Mexico City–based fashion house dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the textile knowledge of Indigenous and mestizo communities across Mexico. Fernández’s work demonstrates how manual methods, collaboration, and tradition can generate fashion that is ethical, innovative, and forward-looking.

Their conversation explores the connection between head, heart, and hand; the importance of going slowly; creation through trust and friendship; and why innovation can emerge from centuries-old techniques. They discuss fashion as resistance, the politics of clothing, confidence and undergarments, technology and weaving, the realities of fast fashion, and what is lost—and possible—when fashion is treated as disposable.

This is a conversation about fashion as cultural expression, collaboration as creation, and the power of choosing the best for the best.

Aindrea Emelife is Curator, Modern and Contemporary at MOWAA (Museum of West African Art), a new museum which opened in Benin City, Nigeria in November 2025. She was also the curator of the Nigeria Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Born in London, United Kingdom, Emelife studied at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her work focuses on questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation. Her recent exhibitions include BLACK VENUS; a survey of the legacy of the Black woman in visual culture which opened at Fotografiska NY and toured to MOAD (San Francisco, USA) and Somerset House (London, UK). Emelife’s first book, A Brief History of Protest Art was released by Tate in March 2022, Emelife has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications, most recently including Revising Modern British Art (Lund Humphries, 2022). In 2021, Emelife was appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm.

She and Zuckerman discuss being seen in institutions, how exhibition making can shape the curator, nuance, artists as activists, what a museum can be, power, ancient traditions as innovation, impact, visibility and belonging, the archive, the human imagination, and not being afraid of imaginative possibility!

Kami Gahiga is a curator and art professional based between Kigali and London. Her work primarily focuses on art from the Global South and she has curated several exhibitions across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.  She is an acting contributor to NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art. Kami is the Art Basel VIP Representative for Africa. Previously, she served as the Head of VIP & Gallery Relations at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (London, Marrakech, New York, Hong Kong). She is a patron of the Delfina Foundation (London, UK), a board member of the Tyburn Foundation Board (Harare, Zimbabwe & Umbria, Italy) and is a Nominator for the Norval Sovereign Art Prize (Cape Town, South Africa). Gahiga is the Co-Founder of the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art opening soon in Kigali, Rwanda!

She and Zuckerman discuss Contemporary Africa Art, creating a new art space in Kigali, Rwanda, multigenerational collecting, African patronage, art and culture as the last frontier in Rwanda, creating interest, the experience of exposure, the idea of beginning, how to inspire, finding answers within, artists opening and operating their own spaces on the continent, and writing manifestos!

Spencer Lewis, born 1979 in Hartford, Connecticut, lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. Known for his gestural paintings on cardboard and jute, Lewis uses flashy bright and colorful notions executed through streaked lines, smears of paint and rough strokes that suggest the impulsive creative process underneath. With chaotic, almost infinite layers, Lewis's canvases conceal and simultaneously unveil a brushstroke, a gesture over the other, stories and moments culminating and accumulating on the painting's densest parts. Despite the apparent unpredictability of Lewis's compositions, they are based on a methodology and structure. Lewis is, in fact, interested in pictorial organization and image-making. Consistently concentrating towards the centre of the canvas, Lewis's brushstrokes frantically tell the different layers of the same narrative. In a podcast recorded live in his LA studio, he and Zuckerman discuss wanting positive things, paint as a fluid object, seeing and feeling distance between ideas, cities, being courageous, finding novelty, what art is really good at, timelessness, how artists want to be free, having an anxious attachment style, why people like complexity, what feels big, the space of color, how and why you need a studio, how to make great paintings, his phrase “for me to make a painting,” how art is still about beauty, remembering that making art will feel bad, and how gratitude works every time!