What drives cultural practitioners to experiment, discover, and create?
Pew Fellow Mikel Patrick Avery spoke with us about being both a maker of art and a maker of tools for art. He shared his reflections on artists as leaders and the things that keep him inspired creatively.
Pew Fellow Rennie Harris sits down for an in-depth conversation about his choreographic approach, the organic nature of street dance, and the influences behind Losing My Religion, which his company Rennie Harris Puremovement premiered at Penn Live Arts in March of 2026.
Pew Fellow Bettina Escauriza spoke with us about the influence of her family, the hand-crafted nature of her work, and her biggest needs as an artist.
Pew Fellow Shavon Norris is a movement and theater artist who makes the unseen, seen. She uses performance to explore the full landscape of people’s internal lives—from grief to joy and pleasure—through a lens of personal healing.
Filmmaker and 2024 Pew Fellow Tshay spoke with us about the power and potential of images to document the present, connect us to the past, and imagine the future.
Filmmaker and Pew Fellow Stewart Thorndike speaks about her love of horror, describing it as a space for defying boundaries and reckoning with darker truths of society not often reflected in conventional filmmaking. She also shares the thrill of her earliest artistic discoveries and the challenges and opportunities technology brings to filmmaking.
Drummer, composer, educator, and Pew Fellow Chad E. Taylor offers thoughts about making space for an array of creative voices in his work, as well as the philosophy behind his practice, and tells stories about his roots as an artist. He also shared a playlist of the music that moves him.
Pew Fellows Shehrezad Maher and Kristen Neville Taylor both consider the nature of memory and personal and collective histories in their creative work. Here, they discuss their artistic practices and processes.
Composer/musician Sumi Tonooka and poet/author Phillip B. Williams discuss commonalities in the ways they “channel” their compositions and how they’ve experienced shifts in their artistic identities.
Filmmaker Darius Clark Monroe and musician Karen Smith talk about tapping into creativity at an early age, striving to extend their artistic legacies, and finding peace at the ocean’s edge.