Monday, September 1, 2014

Artist's Statement


As an artist in our generation, I believe that it is important to try to fight ignorance as much as possible. One of the best platforms to do so these days is through media. I myself happen to learn best through visual images and I hope to be able to create art that is not only entertaining but is also informative and life changing.

As intrigued as I am when watching documentaries, I sometimes feel that the information does not always stick. I am more likely able to cite a quote from Titanic than I am to recite information from a documentary about the tragic incident. Therefore, when creating a film, I hope to take real life scenarios and present day issues and put them into scene. I believe that sometimes films can stir up a kind of compassion in us that an informative documentary may not be able to.

Some of the issues that I am most passionate about as a person are racism and women's equality. Though on the surface it may seem that we have solved both of these problems over the past hundred years, I, as a black woman, feel differently. One of my greatest inspirations in life is my mother who came to America from a small country named Haiti. She came here not speaking a lick of English but took it upon herself to go to school, take ESL classes and learn the language. She would go to college, go to work and at night take her English classes and still find time to come home and help me and my sisters with our homework. She went on to get a master’s degree and start her career. I feel that in television and film, we need more examples of people like my mother to not just tell, but show people what they can achieve.