054: Creativity Can Be a Journey

Catalyst: A Creative Industries Podcast

Catalyst is a Creative Industries podcast, from Chapman University. Each episode features Chapman students who have completed a Podcasting course through the Center for Creative and Cultural Industries at the university. Students who had no podcasting experience or technical ability in the genre before taking the course were able to contribute all the segments to Catalyst this season with the goal being that they will take this ‘hands-on’ experience and carry it over to the launching of their very own series. Each episode of Season 7 will feature one to two different interviews conducted by CCI students, exploring different aspects of the Creative and Cultural Industries.

This week we have a super-sized episode of Catalyst, with a whopping three interviews! Each of our guests this week takes us on a creative journey, one which can be full of unexpected turns, but always gets us to the right destination. To kick us off, Jeremy Scheidt speaks with Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, a Thai filmmaker and Thailand’s first transgender member of parliament. Sukkhapisit who has held a multitude of different jobs within the film industry including being a screenwriter, actor, producer, and director for various television shows, shorts, and feature-length films, and whose most recent directorial work is a TV series titled The War Of Flowers, discusses with Scheidt the realities and challenges of working in the industry. They also tackle what it is like to work in a creative environment within a region that has very specific censorship laws, and how that effects your work, and you as a person.

The second segment of our show this week features an interview with Courtney Donely the Director of Special Events at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, by Sierra Detar. Originally a Women’s Studies major, Donely has an intriguing career journey, that she discusses at length with Detar, including her start with the Make a Wish Foundation, how she found running her own business can be isolating at times, and how everything she has learned along the way has contributed to her finding her right fit in an organization and a position.

In our final segment this week Kaitlyn Kenyon sits down with Madi Atkins, the founder of a creative agency in New York called Madness Studio. A fashion photographer, Atkins launched the studio, as a creative production studio that creates video/photo campaigns, and digital marketing campaigns for clients in the fashion and beauty industries. Atkins opens up to Kenyon about how she got her start and the perks and drawbacks of working in such a fast paced creative industry.