When the Writers Guild of America strike began in early May of 2023, screenwriter, playwright and essayist Dorothy was in the middle of promoting an Apple TV+ mini-series titled “Extrapolations,” on which she’d worked as executive producer and writer. As a result, she had to cancel all appearances relating to the show, which was especially disappointing to her given that it was the first major scripted TV show about climate change. Instead, she braved the blistering heat of summer in Burbank, CA and started walking the picket lines. Dorothy’s TV producing and writing credits also include the acclaimed Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The 100” for the CW network. Her work on “The Handmaid’s Tale” earned her not only multiple Emmy nominations but also a Producers Guild Award as well as a Writers Guild Award. Her plays have been performed all over the country, including at the sadly now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, KY; IAMA Theatre in Los Angeles; and the Red Fern Theatre Company in New York City. Here she describes how in 15 years streaming channels went from being a writer’s playground to an ever more precarious means to earn a basic living. She also explains why the current strike is crucial not only for Writers Guild members but also any worker whose profession is in danger of ever becoming just another gig.  Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Actor and educator Charles Andrew Gardner is starting his fourth term as president of the Chicago local branch of the union SAG-AFTRA. He grew up in Chicago and studied acting at Northern Illinois University. He is a company member with TimeLine Theater and has acted on several of Chicago’s important stages. He has appeared on the Chicago-filmed TV shows “The Chi” and “Chicago P.D.,” and his film credits include “Long Ride Home” and “Olympia.” He has also shot several national commercials for brands including Hyundai and Liberty Mutual, and he has many credits as a voiceover artist. This interview took place a little over five weeks after SAG-AFTRA, having failed to reach an agreement with AMPTP (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), went on strike on July 14, 2023. At the core of the disagreement between the actors and the producers is the amount of residuals actors should receive for streamed content. Also on the negotiating table are the burdens on actors of self-taped auditions, the amount producers should contribute to the union’s healthcare and pension funds and how the use of AI-generated likenesses of performers should be regulated. Here Charles explains why he chose to remain in his hometown as he set out on his acting career and how a passion for education continues to inform his leadership style as he shepherds his fellow union members through this latest challenge. https://www.charlesandrewgardner.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Terri Lyne Carrington is one of the most respected jazz musicians in the world. Her drumming career started at the age of 10, which is when she officially got her musicians’ union card, and in the decades since, she’s earned countless accolades, including four Grammys, a Doris Duke Artist Award and an NEW Jazz Masters Fellowship. She has performed on over 100 recordings and has toured and recorded with jazz legends, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz and Esperanza Spalding. In recent years she has turned her attention to correcting gender inequities in her field. In 2018 she founded the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at her alma mater, Berklee School of Music in Boston. She remains the Institute’s artistic director, ensuring that new generations of female, trans and non-binary musicians are welcomed to contribute their talents to the genre. She’s also passionate about recognizing the contributions women have already made to jazz. To wit, she edited a recently published collection of music titled “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.” Alongside that project, she recorded an album titled “New Standards, Vol. 1” that features several compositions in the book. “New Standards” won Terri Lyne her most recent Grammy, and not surprisingly she plans eventually to record all 101 compositions.  Terri Lyne also recently curated a multi-artist multimedia installation titled “New Standards” that initially opened at the Carr Center in Detroit, where she is artistic director. This interview took place the morning after the closing party celebrating the exhibition of “New Standards” at Emerson Gallery of Contemporary Arts in Boston. https://www.terrilynecarrington.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Woodworker, furniture-maker, artist and educator Aspen Golann trained at the renowned North Bennet Street School in Boston and specializes in building furniture with the techniques of 18th and 19th century American fine woodworking. Her pieces aren’t mere modern iterations of a centuries-old tradition, however. They also often exhibit very modern feminist touches that acknowledge and subvert the power and function of furniture, traditionally made by men, that is created for domestic spaces, historically the domain of women. Aspen’s work has earned her the admiration of the arts-and-crafts establishment. Her work has been featured in American Craft magazine, Fine Woodworking magazine and Architectural Digest. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Mineck Furniture Fellowship from the Society of Arts and Crafts, and this year The Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation gave her one of its prestigious $100,000 unrestricted Awards in Craft. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and in national and international craft workshops. Three years ago, thanks in part to the Minreck Fellowship, Aspen created The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, a three-pronged project that provides free tools, education and mentorship for BIPOC, gender-expansive and female chair- and toolmakers seeking to build sustainable businesses. Here Aspen describes how she herself homed in on her exact passion and explains the inventive ways in which The Chairmaker’s Toolbox makes a career in woodworking a little less daunting for craftspeople who have traditionally been excluded from the field.  https://www.aspengolann.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Barely four months into his tenure as the artistic director of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Adam W. McKinney is already implementing revolutionary ways to build on the company’s existing strengths with his gaze firmly set on its overall health a hundred years from now. Adam has a remarkable resume as a ballet dancer, a choreographer, a professor, an activist and an arts leader. He danced with some of the world’s most renowned ballet companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Béjart Ballet in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was the co-founder and co-director of DNAWORKS, an arts-and-service organization based in Fort Worth, TX, dedicated to dialogue and healing through the arts. Among DNAWORKS’ many projects is the interactive “Forth Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse.” Thanks to an app with augmented-reality features, the tour allows audiences — whether in person or virtually — to visit four sites in Fort Worth associated with the December 11, 1921 lynching of Mr. Rouse. DNAWORKS also produced “The Borders Project,” which uses a variety of creative performances and events to explore the histories of manmade borders and their effects on the human spirit and body. “The Borders Project” has so far worked on the U.S./Mexico and Israel/Palestine borders. Adam was also awarded the NYU President’s Service Award for his dance work with populations who struggle with heroin addiction. Before accepting his new post in Pittsburgh, he was the Associate Professor of Dance and Ballet at Texas Christian University, a tenured position he took on after having served as the inaugural Dance Department Chair at New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe. In this interview he describes the core beliefs and practices he believes will make ballet a rigorous, sustainable contemporary artform accessible and welcoming to all for generations to come. https://www.pbt.org/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Norma Baker-Flying Horse’s designs are the stuff of fashion runway dreams. They display the sophistication, impeccable tailoring and gorgeous lines of her fashion idols, including Chanel and McQueen, but what makes them exceptional is that they incorporate gorgeous details that bespeak her Native heritage. Norma Baker-Flying Horse, whose company, Red Berry Woman, bears her given Native name, is a member of the Hidatsa, Dakota Sioux and Assiniboine tribes, and her creations often bear designs from these cultures rendered via traditional techniques, including intricate beadwork and/or appliques of smoked hide, sometimes even feathers or shells. And all in a spectacular color palette. Norma has been designing bespoke pieces in and for her community for years, but recently her reach has gone national and international. She showed at Paris Fashion Week in 2019; in 2022 she won Designer of the Year at Phoenix Fashion Week and was also the co-recipient of a Cultural Recognition Visual Arts Grammy; and just in the past year Miss Minnesota wore a Red Berry Woman gown in the Miss America pageant. Here she explains how she wed her forebears’ cultural skills and know-how with a taste for glamor she unexpectedly cultivated as a little girl in toy heels on the North Dakota prairie to create a singular brand. She also describes the rigors of being a self-taught and self-guided business owner who won’t even let a C-section keep her from delivering a gown on schedule. https://redberrywoman.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Dancer/choreographer Michael Manson is an internationally recognized authority in Detroit Jit, a dance genre birthed in his hometown over 50 years ago. His talent earned him a national audience when he appeared on “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2015, and as a performer and teacher he has worked all over the States and as far away as Paris and La Paz. Once a student of famed dancer/choreography Rennie Harris, he now tours with Rennie Harris Puremovement in performances of “Caravan,” starring jazz scholar Terence Blanchard. Last year, Mike, in conjunction with the non-profit Living Arts, was one of five recipients of a prestigious Joyce Foundation grant for artists working in the Great Lakes region. Thanks to the grant’s support, Mike has been able to commit to his passion, namely teaching young people in Detroit about their city’s rich cultural history and ensuring that Detroit Jit is recognized, respected and studied as a distinctive American dance genre. The Joyce Foundation grant also allowed him to create “Rhythm of the Feet,” a concert-length dance production that not only centers Detroit Jit but also, thanks to a cast of professional dancers from around the country, places it in the context of other seminal American footwork styles, such as tap, Chicago footwork, House, Memphis Jookin and Lindy Hop. Here he describes how he developed his passion for cultural preservation in tandem with his dance skills and explains why he takes pride in seeing his students overtake him … as long as they remain respectful of the Jit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSSGccDQNXM&t=51s https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ioq0MK1mhdg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p7ZHQqOEX_0 Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Early in her career, Maura video essayist and performance artist Maura Brewer explored the relationship between representations of women in Hollywood films and the structures of contemporary capitalism. Through several often-tongue-in-cheek video pieces, she focused on the actor Jessica Chastain, who at the time was being typecast in films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” as a steely go-getter who paid a steep personal price for her ambition. In recent years, Maura’s focus has shifted from representations created by capitalism to the underlying financial structures that uphold it. To wit, she is deep into a years-long project titled “Private Client Services” that explores how the rich launder money through art acquisition and sales. In this project, which Maura is documenting meticulously through video and writing, she herself is doing the very thing she is studying, namely laundering money through art. Maura is not entering this world entirely dewy-eyed, however. For several years, in addition to being an artist, she has worked as an experienced professional private investigator, garnering skills that are proving invaluable in her forays into the world of money laundering. Her work has been exhibited at spaces including MoMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her projects have appeared in The Guardian, CBS News and The Paris Review. She is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow, a 2022 Creative Capital fellow, and a recipient of the Fellowship for Visual Artists at the California Community Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Master Artist Fellowship. In this interview, she details how she, once a fiber artist, harnessed her own investigative talents to create performance and video art about a crime that uses art as its primary instrument.  https://maurabrewer.com/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Robin Tran has been performing standup comedy for the past 11 years, but it is only in the last eight that she has been performing under the name Robin. Before her transition in 2015, she presented as male and used the name Robert. During the pandemic, she gained a sizeable and loyal following via TikTok, and in 2021 she was featured as one of the “New Faces” of the year by the influential Just for Laughs festival. In the last couple of years, she’s enjoyed some very prominent appearances on various TV and streaming platforms, including “Comedy Central Roast” and Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring.” Last year she also appeared on the Netflix show “That’s My Time With David Letterman.” In this episode, Robin describes how she’s managed to cultivate and grow her career despite an industry that at first didn’t know what to do with her and explains why, when all is said and done, she may always remain “a pro-wrestling bad guy. “ https://www.instagram.com/robintran04/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Alexandria Wailes is an accomplished actor, choreographer and dancer who just this last season appeared on Broadway in the acclaimed revival of Ntozake Shange’s seminal play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The production, directed by UNCSA alum Camille A. Brown, held one notable surprise, the use of American Sign Language, since Alexandria, who is Deaf, played the Lady in Purple, a part that had not originally been written as a Deaf character. This was not her first time on Broadway. She understudied Marlee Matlin in the revival of “Spring Awakening,” and then she went on in the part for the run’s final month. Before that, she acted in the legendary Deaf West Theatre production of “Big River,” which after its Broadway run toured throughout the U.S. and even played not once but twice in Tokyo. She’s acted in some of the country’s most respected regional theaters, from Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theater to Los Angeles’s Kirk Douglas Theater, and she has also been featured in several popular TV shows, including “Nurse Jackie” and “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.” She is a member of Heidi Latsky Dance Company, and she is the co-founder of BHO5, a company whose mission is, “to usher in a new era of authentic artistic representation of American deaf people.” In this episode, Alexandria describes how she crafted her remarkable career as a multidisciplinary performer and explains the work that must still be done to ensure that not only Deaf but also hearing performers can feel fully informed and bolstered in work that features Deaf artists and/or subjects.  http://www.alexandriawailes.com/home.html https://www.bho5.org/ Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.