When it comes to the distinctive artistic practices and creative challenges that drive today’s artists, our Pew Fellows have a wealth of insights, representing a diversity of perspectives across age, background, and creative disciplines.

In this installment, novelist Camille Acker and filmmaker Sabaah Folayan discuss the origins of their practices, creative influences, and dream projects.

Acker’s multi-genre novels and short stories interrogate race, class, and gender, contrasting the societal expectations and self-determined identities of Black women and girls. Folayan engages with her collaborators and subjects in fiction and documentary films through a holistic and trauma-informed approach, guided by principles of behavioral science and social justice.

Camille Acker
It says in your bio that you were in a pre-med program. Does your interest in medicine show up in your filmmaking?

Sabaah Folayan
An early interest in science initially drew me toward the idea of becoming a doctor, but it was medicine as a Western industry that pushed me to change course. I think science and storytelling share the same goal of generating a deeper shared understanding of the phenomenon of existence. While the output is very different, the processes call on similar faculties. In a more practical sense, I do apply principles of trauma-informed care to the way I build relationships with my protagonists as well as my audience.

Folayan
Your novel Training School for Negro Girls engages with the history of Black women and girls in this country. What role does history play in your practice, and how do you personally experience the impact of history in the present?

Acker
There's no escaping history, especially in writing about Black women and girls. My interest is in what you do with that history, how do you reconcile it? Where do you put it in the day-to-day of living? What happens if you try to ignore it? The training schools of the 1900s opened by Black educators were bold attempts to create life-changing institutions for Black people, but the force of history also often compelled them to shape the curriculum to the visions and fears of white people. Family history can do this to us as well. Do you become who someone expects you to be, or do you become who you were meant to be? Unresolved history is particularly present in this moment, and it's because on a societal, cultural, and personal level we haven't reconciled what was to figure out what is.

Acker 
Who are your creative influences?

Folayan 
I am heavily influenced by Black women griots, who watched and listened as much as they spoke and who walked the line between social scientist and artist, stepping from one side to the other as the moment required. Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Aimée Césaire, the list could go on. I am also influenced by Black women musicians, singers like Nina Simone, who found freedom in breath, if nowhere else. I credit Latin American surrealists like Frida Kahlo and Gabriel García Márquez with shaping the vocabulary of my dreams and fantasies. I am also inspired by screenwriters like Jane Campion and John Singleton, who seemed to be able to capture life on screen with the acuity of a documentary.

Folayan
This is a question about embodiment in creativity. People often ask artists who we’re making work for, but I want to know where do you make work from? In terms of your inner world, your felt sense of reality, where do you draw from when you are in the creative process? What does inspiration feel like for you?

Acker
Often inspiration feels like a thrumming inside of me. Something sparks—an overheard line, an odd event, a paragraph in a Wikipedia entry—and then the idea begins to resonate. I try to get it down in a notes app or on a blank document in my writing program. Encounters with other works of art—a book, a television show, a visual art piece, music—will often add layers to the initial idea. From there, I'm asking myself questions on a walk, in the shower, right before falling asleep. Until finally I sit down and begin to really write and untangle the narrative threads along the way. Basically, mysticism mixed with the typing skills I learned in high school.

Acker
What is your dream cinematic project?

Folayan
I’d like to make an insect movie. In 1998, we got Antz and A Bug’s Life within six weeks of each other, and it was an epic experience for 7-year-old me. I’d tell the story of my childhood and use the fun and whimsy of the bug world to make room for some of the hard stuff I experienced as a kid, while also taking the opportunity to play. My dream is to have a creative practice that feels like play.

We also asked the artists a few questions of our own.

When did you know you were an artist? Was there a moment when you began to identify yourself as an artist?

Acker
“Artist” took me longer to claim than “writer,” and even “writer” took me some time. I knew as a girl that I wanted to write, but identifying myself as that title took me nearly until my 30s to say without dismissing the answer in my own head. And the notion of calling myself an artist probably first came when I did some photography in grad school, but that too took years for me to settle into and is only a term I've used about myself in the last 5–6 years. Prose is my primary medium and likely always will be, but I do "see" my work as I'm writing. I picture the scenes I try to get down on the page. And so, even that visual understanding of my work makes me think about a wider horizon it may one day take.

Folayan 
To me, being an artist means understanding oneself as part of the phenomenon of nature and treating self-expression as a natural human process, like the blooming of a flower. People who are not artists are those who choose to express what is prescribed and permitted, rather than their own unique truth. There are many people who are paid to create things but who are not artists, and many artists who are not paid or even recognized as such. My mother is a singer/musician and visual artist, and as a kid I would create in any form I could get my hands on. I was a theater kid and got recognition in numerous performing arts through high school and college. Being pre-med was sort of a departure, and I always felt like an artist in disguise. I feared that being an artist for a living meant struggling financially and tried to opt for a more secure path but the feeling of being an artist was always present.

What images or things keep you company in the space where you work?

Folayan 
I surround myself with my awards and accolades to remind myself that I am a real and serious person and this is all really happening, because it sometimes feels like a dream. I keep technical books about whatever medium I am working in at hand, because it makes me feel hungry like a student and keeps me excited about perfecting my craft. I also have a catch-all board with notes and thoughts and ideas that don’t yet have homes but that I know are important to me.

Acker 
I have a large painting by a Black woman artist from Brooklyn I bought years ago, and the portrait hangs above the desk in my office. The woman in the painting has a defiant and sensual gaze. Her neck and upper chest are exposed. The background is dark blue. It stopped me when I first saw it, and something still arrests me when I look at it. She stands alone, so she is the focus, fully herself and direct in her stare. There's a nonchalance to her power that I love, that speaks to the way I want to move in the world, for the way I imagine many of my characters do too. Also in my creative space: family photos, candles, a monogrammed journal, sage, and many, many, many books.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Acker
I had a boss once who talked about the shifts in his career in decades, an architect in these ten years, a professor in the next, etc. It's a way of thinking about a life of work that I connect with. Some professions that may occupy my decades to come: filmmaker; chef; master gardener; bookstore/cafe owner; nosy, curmudgeonly old Black woman.

Folayan
I’d like to be a performing artist who dances, sings and plays the bass, an inventor of new energy and water technologies, or a psychologist.