Conversations about making space for collaboration, community, and creativity.
Making Space for a Creative Life
In this episode, I talk with artists and co-directors Tamalin Baumgarten and Meredith Leich about the Cuttyhunk Island Artist Residency and the creative partnership that sustains it. Together they explore how friendship became partnership, how trust shapes their decision-making, and how care, logistics, and attention form the invisible structure of a successful residency. They talk candidly about the behind-the-scenes labor of running an island program, from ferry schedules and groceries to emotional attunement and staff wellbeing. This is a conversation about creative life as a collective practice. About holding space for others while staying connected to one’s own work. And about why, for Meredith and Tamalin, the residency is not an end point, but the beginning of long creative relationships.
Sustaining a Creative Life Through Collaboration
In this episode, I talk to brand strategist James Wu, founder of Studio Tomo, about creativity as a collective practice rather than a solo pursuit. James shares how his early love of album art, magazines, and design shaped his understanding of brand as feeling and experience. He traces his career from digital advertising to nonprofit work, and eventually to founding Studio Tomo, a studio built around collaboration, empathy, and mission-driven work. We explore how creative teams function best when they reflect the communities they serve, why relationship-building matters more than efficiency, and how misunderstandings can be navigated through trust, vulnerability, and time. James also reflects on parenting, leadership, burnout, and the cost of empathy when it becomes overextended. This is a conversation about building creative ecosystems, honoring lived experience, and sustaining work that is thoughtful, relational, and grounded in care.
Shaping a Creative Life Together
In this episode, I talk with artists and collaborators Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence, whose creative partnership spans performance, publishing, and multi-year collaborative projects. Their work includes the long-running art publication Headmaster and the immersive musical documentary Scandalous Conduct, rooted in archival research about the Newport Navy Sex Scandal of 1919. Together they explore what it means to build a life by building work together: how shared creative labor becomes a way of shaping identity, supporting one another, and moving through the world with curiosity and conviction. This is a conversation about collaboration as intimacy, community as practice, and how two people can create a creative ecosystem that feeds them both.