upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

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Tayarisha Poe 2016 Knight Fellow

Tayarisha Poe (ACG '15, '14) was named one of four 2016 Knight Fellows at the Sundance Film Festival. The other artist include, Faren Humes of Miami, Ill Weaver/Invincible of Detroit (former Leeway panelist), and Tiana LaPointe of St. Paul. These artists reflect Sundance Institute and the Knight Foundation's commitment to developing and nurturing the next generation of creative voices. Knight Fellows are afforded a five-day residency at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where they participate in a specially curated program. On the heels of the 2016 Festival, the 2016 Knight Fellows reflect on their experiences in Park City and share insights on how their disparate communities affect their approach to storytelling.

Here is what Tayarisha said about her art and her experience at the festival:

What is your orientation toward your art – whether it is filmmaking, photography, or other mediums – and how do you choose a format to tell a story?

It’s a bit of an instant feeling: this should be told through still images, this will be a short story, this can only be a film. I like to work at the intersection of fiction and reality. My photos tell stories, my stories create images, and my videos make you feel like you’re eavesdropping on another person’s private conversation. I believe stories are inherently multi-sensory and multi-dimensional, and therefore should be told as such. I aim to, rather than create a window through which one may view the world, drop the viewer into the center of a world built by someone else’s moral compass. When I was writing Selah and the Spades, keeping myself open to that multi-dimensional way of storytelling let me see the characters as they naturally presented themselves.

To what extent and how has your community influenced your artistry?

My city, especially the neighborhood where I grew up and currently live in (West Philly), often acts as a character itself in my work. West Philly has a particularly eclectic blend of older revolutionaries, young people committed to communal living, and colorful but peeling houses. I feel like I’m constantly at attention as I walk through the neighborhood, taking in the continued gentrification, the developers from Brooklyn developing the old high school into condos, the five dollar (delicious, fantastic, heavenly) vegan donuts and the ten dollar ice cream sandwich pop up shops – I take it all in. It affects what I do, it creates within me a complicated way of existing, and my work is all about complicated existences. I can’t help but see that as a result of where I’m from and who I am: of knowing simultaneously that I’m not a gentrifier – I’m from here, I grew up here, my family is scattered throughout the city, my roots may be all over the world, but all my branches and flowers fall here. Yet? Yet those ice cream sandwiches are worth it. And I still patronize the local craft brewery. It’s complicated.

How does the Knight Fellowship align with or support your personal creative ventures?

The Knight Fellowship asks us to actively consider the complications and complexities of who we are, where we’re from, and how those identities play into our art making. I’m all about that. This Fellowship encourages an unapologetic multitudinous approach to explorations of the self and of the characters within one’s stories, fact or fiction.

What was one significant insight, connection, or revelation you gained from your experience while at the Sundance Film Festival?

No one has to help you. No one has to read your script. No one has to connect you to a producer, or to someone with cash. No one has to do any single thing for you, or for your story. So if people are offering, then they’re offering for a reason: know that, and run with it.

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