Creative Arts & Media Circle

For African and African-diaspora women in film, television, photography, illustration, fashion design, writing, music, theater, and adjacent creative-industries work. The room where directors, designers, writers, cinematographers, costume designers, editors, agents, and the other working professionals across creative arts talk to each other about the actual work and the actual industry.

Membership includes working creatives at every career stage. Emerging writers with one published book or in active submission. Mid-career directors with two or three features behind them. Established cinematographers with festival-award records. Fashion designers building studios. Photographers on commercial and editorial circuits. Composers, songwriters, and musicians across genres. Producers. Costume designers. Production designers. Hair and makeup department heads. Editors. Sound designers. Across film, television, theater, publishing, fashion, music, and digital media.

What we talk about. Contracts. The agreements we have signed and what we have learned. The clauses that protect us. The clauses that have hurt us in retrospect. The lawyers we recommend across creative industries. The talent-agency relationships and the manager relationships. The trade-union and guild structures in our specific fields — SAG-AFTRA, WGA, DGA, ASC, ASCAP, BMI, the Authors Guild, and others.

Agents and managers. The agent who has changed our careers. The agent who has not. The decision to change representation. The decision to go without representation for a phase. The fee structures and what they actually deliver. The introductions agents have and have not been able to make.

Festival strategy. For filmmakers — Sundance, Berlinale, Cannes, Toronto, Locarno, AFI Fest, Tribeca, the African festivals like FESPACO and DIFF and Carthage. The decision of which festival to premiere at. The publicist work. The press strategy. The film-market component. The way premiere and post-premiere strategy affects distribution.

Indie financing. The financing stacks for low-budget features. The grant-and-fellowship work — Sundance Institute, Cinereach, Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken & Egg, IFP, the long list of organizations supporting independent filmmakers from underrepresented backgrounds. The crowdfunding experiences. The producer-and-financier matching.

Studio and network deals. The members working inside studio and network systems on bigger-budget projects. The development processes. The note-giving culture. The executive politics. The way notes affect the work and the art of incorporating them without losing the voice that got you hired.

Publishing. The book-deal landscape. The advance amounts and the agent's role in negotiating them. The acquisition editor relationships. The publicist relationships. The tour strategy. The follow-up book and the difficulty of the second book. The hybrid publishing decisions. The indie-press deals when the corporate publishing landscape is not where a project belongs.

Fashion. The studio work. The retail relationships. The wholesale calendar. The trade-show circuit. The manufacturing-partner work. The brand-building. The specific dynamics of being a Black-woman-led fashion studio in the broader industry.

Music. The studio time. The producer relationships. The label deals and the independent paths. The publishing and the songwriting credits. The performance-rights organizations. The touring economics.

Photography. The commercial-and-editorial split. The specific portfolio choices that have built careers. The art-photography circuit. The print sales. The exhibition history.

Cross-discipline. The members who work across film and fashion, music and visual art, writing and television, and the slow career shaping that comes from refusing to stay in a single category.

Credit politics. The slow work of getting the credit you earned on a project. The credit you did not receive and the path you took to address it. The way industry credit systems have historically failed women of color and the specific cases members have navigated. The lessons.

Mentorship. The senior women in this room mentoring emerging creatives in their fields. The structured mentorship programs some members have built. The way we share specific opportunities and access.

Cadence: a daily channel for industry news and quick questions. A weekly long-form thread on a craft or industry topic. A monthly virtual gathering, often a portfolio review or a script-page exchange or a music demo share. Subgroups by discipline. Regional in-person meetups in major creative-industry cities. An annual convening.

Rules. Confidentiality on deals, advances, and unreleased work. No leaking client material. No sharing other people's scripts or songs or designs without their permission. Honest peer feedback on members' work when invited; no unsolicited critique.

What we are not: a portfolio site, a casting database, or a substitute for the formal trade unions and guilds in our fields.

What we are: the working group for African and diaspora women in creative industries. The room where the contract questions get answered honestly. The room where the festival strategy gets debated by people who have premiered at all of them. The room where we share access and protect each other's interests inside industries that have rarely centered us. We are the credits at the bottom of the films, the songs, the books, the runway shows that carry our names. We deserve a community among ourselves that knows what the work actually requires. Here it is.