Sista Brunch

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eleventh of fifteen conversations from that day.

Our drop-in co-host Shawn Pipkin-West — a director and UPM who was a Sista Brunch guest twice before joining us behind the mic — sits down with her friend Janean Jeffries, an executive assistant. Asked what they believed five years ago and no longer do, Shawn says she believed she had to be perfect. What replaced it is a practice of saying yes to what scares her, including this podcast. Janean believed she was too essential to be laid off while doing the work of seven people. She was wrong, and what she took from it is sharper than bitterness: no one needs you, so create things for yourself and build your own community. Shawn also talks about directing one of five horror shorts made in two weeks, deliberately choosing the most ambitious script in the pile.

Being on Sista Brunch was on Janean's vision board. As of this episode, it's manifested — welcome to the family.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the tenth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Charisma Justice and Michelle Turner joined us through our talent producer Kamesha Rodriguez, and gave us one of the most candid conversations of the day. Asked when she last felt truly seen, Charisma says she isn't there yet — she's mid-career-change and planning a cross-country move, living in what she calls the pre stage. Her definition of arriving has nothing to do with status: enough money that the bills don't register, room in the back to build a house for her mother, her child next door, and no one worrying about long-term care. On rest, she's blunt about why Black women don't take it, and honest about what her own version looks like. Michelle shares that she chose to step back after years of giving herself to other people's dreams, and wonders now whether she's been resting too long.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

This is our first collaboration episode. We teamed up with Consider This for Comfort, the award-winning podcast hosted by Eteng Ettah, to welcome back Hillman ahead of A Different World's premiere on Netflix on Thursday, September 24.

In the first half, Eteng and Fanshen talk about what the original series meant to them and to a generation of Black viewers. They get into the case for a sequel in an era of reboots, and why Felicia Pride as showrunner matters. They also talk about the state of Black Hollywood, and where to find and support our stories beyond the studios.

In the second half, we go behind the scenes with Jen Farris, an Atlanta-based film and TV location scout. Jen explains how location tells a story and how she went from the music business to scouting. She also shares what it meant for the new A Different World to film on real HBCU campuses in the Atlanta University Center.

Then Eteng and Jen sit down to our signature Sista Brunch question.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

00:35 Welcome to the collab

02:50 What makes a comfort show

06:40 First memories of A Different World

12:50 The case for a sequel

22:00 The state of Black Hollywood

26:50 Festivals and Black-owned distribution

30:10 Who we're becoming

35:00 Eteng's Sista Brunch

38:30 Meet Jen Farris

41:10 What a location scout does

49:00 From music to film

52:50 When we see us on set

56:30 Scouting Hillman

61:30 A Different World and HBCU enrollment

70:00 Movie magic on a budget

77:30 Jen's Sista Brunch

81:30 Where to follow Jen

Co-host/Guests

Eteng Ettah is a pop culture commentator and host of Consider This for Comfort.

Instagram: @etenggg | @considerthisforcomfortpod

Jen Farris is a 15-year Atlanta-based film and TV location scout with 28 years in arts and entertainment. Her credits include Atlanta, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Genius: Aretha, Game Night, Sleepy Hollow. She is a member of Teamsters Local 728 and served as secretary of the Location Managers Guild International board of directors (2021–2022). She also hosts Yo, Did You Know?

Instagram: @msjenfarris | @yo.didyouknow

Website: jen-farris.com

Mentioned in this episode

• A Different World (Netflix)
• UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report
• Kweli TV
• American Black Film Festival
• Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival
• BronzeLens Film Festival
• BlackStar Film Festival
• Our June 2020 episode with Felicia Pride: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/felicia-pride-replay-on-pivoting-ownership-and/id1506316350?i=1000791006528

Watch and listen

Listen to Consider This for Comfort: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/consider-this-for-comfort/id1823537949

Fanshen Cox and guest co-host Christabel Nsiah-Buadi welcome writer, director, and producer Felicia Pride to Sista Brunch for the first remote-recorded episode during COVID-19. Pride traces her path from marketing and posting poetry online to freelance journalism, grad school, book publishing, and authoring six books, including The Message, before a seven-year pause from writing while running a marketing consultancy. After burnout and a layoff in film distribution, she recommitted to screenwriting, publicly reclaimed her identity as a writer, and built her career through classes, coaching, and strategic work. Pride discusses marketing as sharing one’s journey, hiring a publicist, impact producing, and using those skills to crowdfund and release her short film Tender, centered on self-love, intimacy, and Gen X Black queer women. She also shares coping with racial trauma through therapy while working as a staff writer on Grey’s Anatomy and highlights Create Daily as a resource for underrepresented creators.

00:00 Pandemic Pivot Intro

00:39 Felicia Pride Snapshot

02:03 Welcome and Guest Bio

05:04 Origins and Early Writing

06:18 Journalism to Publishing

07:57 Six Books and Burnout

08:44 Consulting Years and Reset

09:19 Move to LA and Layoff

11:53 Reclaiming the Gift

14:57 Marketing Yourself Publicly

17:00 Why a Publicist Matters

19:20 Defining Your Career Story

19:49 Impact Campaigns Teaser

20:12 Impact Producing Explained

20:59 Tender as Brand

24:17 Ownership and Community Funding

27:19 COVID Work and Healing

30:47 Tender Themes and Self Love

32:19 Why Gen X Stories

36:03 Where to Watch and Follow

36:37 Create Daily Opportunities

37:26 Final Thanks and Wrap

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the ninth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Four-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning bilingual producer Geraldine Porras sits down with Liz Franco, Manager of Original Documentary Series at Netflix. Geraldine shares what it was like to co-executive produce We Need to Talk About Cosby with W. Kamau Bell — an intimidating subject that required holding space for survivors to tell their own truths, and surfacing why coming forward is so costly. Her throughline: start the hard conversations, because nothing moves otherwise. Liz reflects on the job she almost turned down in 2019, choosing CNN over a network centering Black and Latinx stories, and what learning the buyer side of a major corporation gave her. Together they talk about being in rooms that weren't designed for you, and what you can still change from inside them.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Hanelle Culpepper is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for "Exodus," the season two finale of Paradise on Hulu. She is the second Black woman ever nominated in that category.

So we are bringing back our 2020 conversation with her, with a new introduction from Fanshen recorded ahead of the ceremony.

In this episode, Hanelle tells Fanshen Cox and Anya Adams how she became the first woman to launch a Star Trek series in the franchise's history. One meeting. No script. A weekend to build a look book. Then Patrick Stewart's approval. She also talks about having no plan B, about building a range of reels so she could direct anything, and about the thing her manager asked her that changed how she worked: did you actually tell them what you want?

Star Trek turned sixty this month. Hanelle got there first.

Originally released in 2020 as episode 4, Season 2.

Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LbRFczB02ZY

Sista Brunch team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, and Shawn Pipkin-West.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eighth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Award-winning filmmaker Tamika Lamison sits down with Kai Bowe, Director of Current Programming, Unscripted at the Oprah Winfrey Network. Tamika's message to the next generation: know your power, and treat perfection as poison — what we do is magic, so make magic and make mistakes. Kai explains why imposter syndrome has never applied to her, then shares the hardest lesson of her career: losing a career-defining documentary because she led out of fear rather than diplomacy, and what she rebuilt from it. Together they name the weight of expected excellence that Black women carry into every room, and what it costs.

Tamika appears twice in this series — she's also in Volume 1. We first connected with her at the Black Girls Film Camp retreat, then Essence 2024.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the seventh of fifteen conversations from that day.

Diana Williams — CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, previously Creative Development and Franchise Producer for Star Wars at Lucasfilm — sits down with Liz Franco, a documentary executive at a major streamer. They talk about small victories that renew hope, including a first trip to the Creative Arts Emmys and the experience of looking around a room and not seeing many people who look like you. Diana shares what she's proudest of across a long career in games, film, and podcasts: not the credits, but strangers finding joy in the work. And she names the tradeoff of this moment — it's never been easier to make something, and never been harder to get anyone's attention for it.

Diana was our guest in Season 7, Episode 13 — "From the DGA Training Program to Building the Future of IP" — available wherever you're listening now.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the sixth of fifteen conversations from that day.

LMU film student Kalle White sits down with Daria Strachan, a Black Girls Film Camp alum we first met at Essence Festival 2024. Kalle talks about how a year of injuries reshaped her thinking about disability and how much of the world is inaccessible — and about the early decision rejection that devastated her before it redirected her. Daria makes the case that you cannot fake your way through the film industry: not pretending to care about social issues, not pretending you're fine with how colleagues talk to you. Put your whole self out there, or you're not making real art.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the fifth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Poet, author, speaker, and actor Arielle Estoria — author of The Unfolding — sits down with writer, engineer, and Made For More Entertainment founder Daniel K. Hunter. The card asks about the first creative spark. Arielle explains why she spills instead of writes, why ideas leave us if we don't foster them, and how recording her audiobook revealed the real difference between a writer and a poet. Daniel reflects on studios as creative laboratories and makes the case that podcasting isn't fizzling — it's a hundred years of radio instinct coming back with our own technological spin.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.