Hicham Gardaf is a photographer who was born in Tangier, Morocco, and is currently based in London. Gardaf’s work at its centre poses questions that investigate transformations of contemporary landscape, spatiality and politics of space. While he was back in Tangier for a brief trip home, I invited Hicham over for coffee and this conversation, in which we dove into how his lifelong love of looking at pictures and images transformed into taking and curating them into his own art. In his soft-spoken and uniquely humble way, Hicham shared how he got to where he is as an artist by recognizing opportunity, his interests in the relationship between photography, painting & cinema, some of Tanger’s history that he has been documenting and researching in terms of development and architecture, his interest in “vague space,” and why, for him, the creative process of being a photographer is backwards.

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A solo episode for the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, looking back on how I got started with this podcast, sharing how I prep for interviews, 3 major lessons I’ve learned in the first 9 months of podcasting, and gazing forward to the future.

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Abigail Hing Wen was born in West Virginia and raised in Ohio as a child of immigrant parents, both of Chinese descent. She is the author of the bestselling YA novel Loveboat, Taipei. In this conversation, Abigail and I not only got into to process of how she wrote her wonderful book, but we connected on so many levels- as dancers, creative & intuitive thinkers, and musical lovers. We explored how she has felt the calling to write her whole life, the on-going balancing act of juggling her intensive jobs, writing career & family life, why she had to write her book in full four different times, how her MFA program created a community around writing, how we each define creative freedom, and so much more.

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Ellen Humphreys is a New Mexico-based actress, originally born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Some of her past productions include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl, Home with a View of the Monster, and the films Outlaws Don’t Get Funerals, and Running with The Devil. In this conversation, we talk about her path to becoming the actor she is today, language and a fascination with people being her starting point of her career, the importance of community and her personal process of preparing for a role, the conversational nature of acting, and we have a great discussion on whether being an actor is more of an art or a craft.

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In this solo episode I’ve decided to begin to reflect on some of the common themes that keep coming up over and over again in my conversations with diverse artists. Namely, the power of intuition in the creative process. I cite past episodes where it has been discussed, try to define what intuition means, and tell my own story of listening to my inner intuitive voice in order to make a huge, life-changing decision. I also include a little Q&A with listener questions about what inspires me and life as a woman in Morocco.

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Vie Boheme is a Motown native, blossomed in Pittsburgh and refined in Minneapolis. She is a multimodal artist; a dancer, singer and choreographer. Vie was singing in Casablanca in 2019 and I invited her to come hang out with me in Tangier for a weekend. We talked about everything from how she has explored heritage and history in her music and performance art and the general evolution of her career, to some of the issues with the dance world and why she has struck out on her own in order to connect on a deeper level with the energy of an audience. We also got into the major issue of gaps in education when it comes to showcasing black female artists and how Vie often creates her work as a response to these inequities. 

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Caleb Hinz is a musician, producer, t-shirt maker and artist from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Some of the highlights of what we covered in this conversation are chatting about how his artistic upbringing impacted his current work, the benefits of surrounding yourself with creative people in your life, how he juggles what seems like a million projects at once, Caleb’s song-writing process, and defining success. We also get into how his t-shirt brand Normal Parents began, and the story behind the head-scratching slogan on one of his tees, which is “art changes nothing.”

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As a self-proclaimed maker, Sanne Clifford uses the languages of dance, movement, words and film, choreographing them into moving stories and conversations. She is a Dutch artist and choreographer, living and working in Amsterdam and touring her work abroad. In this conversation between two choreographers in Sanne’s lovely Amsterdam apartment, we dig into the details of how Sanne got to where she is in her career today- how she chose what to study, the steps she took to form her own company, and the research that she puts into each and every project. Because we met through Choreolab Europe, we talk quite a bit about the art of collaboration and play- both with other dancers and interdisciplinary collaborations. We also talk about how values are reflected in the creative process, what it means to feel secure and safe as an artist, and what dance means to her.

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Shana Kaplow is a visual artist working with large-scale, ink-on-paper installation, sculpture, and video. Her images of mass-produced household objects peruse the familiar and the enigmatic confronting a society organized around ever-expanding consumption and exploitation. In this face-to-face conversation in Shana Kaplow's beautiful St. Paul studio, we cover a huge range of topics including experiencing and making a painting as an embodied experience, the energetic quality of subject matter, ephemeral experiences of everyday objects, and the complexity of paradoxes in art and life. We talk about Shana’s relationship to art and at the same time, how art is a way of expressing her relationship to the world around her.

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Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-Lebanese poet, writer, and aphorist. He grew up in Egypt, attended university in the states and eventually moved there later in life and is still based in Florida to this day. He has written several critically acclaimed books including his first book of aphorisms, Signposts to Elsewhere, a collection of poetry, Balancing Acts, and his newest compilation of aphorisms, Where Epics fail: Meditations to Live By. We discuss Yahia’s literary background, displacement and the concept of formulating your own creative home, the difference between writing prose, poetry and aphorisms, and the beauty and terror of having an artistic calling. Within the realm of callings, we also delve into the image of the suffering artist and the deep connectedness of faith and art. 

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