We were lucky to catch up with Brittany Quickel recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

Before I started learning about filmmaking and reading tarot for clients, I had an entirely different career as a sign language
interpreter for ten years which I recently retired from in 2021. As much as I try to fantasize about what my life would have looked like if I had started making films sooner, or if I had pursued my craft full-time at a younger age, I actually wouldn’t go back and change anything about my journey.

My career as a sign language interpreter took me to places I would’ve never seen in my own personal life. Over the decade of my career, I’ve interpreted wedding vows, death wishes, babies being born, speeches by former presidents and heads of state, business meetings, interviews, political protests, doctor’s appointments, and therapy sessions. I’ve interpreted at The White House, United Nations, on Wall Street, and internationally. I have countless stories from the thousands of people I’ve met and those stories have had an immense impact on the person I am today.

All of those interpreting stories are actually confidential so I’ll never tell them as they actually happened, however over time these
stories have added to this rich landscape of realistic characters and situations in my mind that I would’ve never had access to without
those experiences.

Some filmmakers struggle with making their ideas come to life with truly accurate realism if they’re trying to portray a world they
haven’t experienced first hand. This is why I’m a huge advocate of writers writing what they know best from their own lived experience for a myriad of different reasons. These experiences where I’ve been able to see other people’s lives in these intimate ways have only enhanced and expanded my worldview as a human being and as a storyteller.

So my advice to fellow creatives who wish they started sooner is to remember that nothing you’ve ever done or created is a waste. All of your experiences and stories have contributed to who you are. Before I studied sign language interpreting in college, I had been a dancer and a community theatre kid who wanted to go to college to study musical theatre.

Looking back, I’m grateful I didn’t pursue that path because I know I might not have had the financial security that I had from my career since I graduated college in 2013. However, I was unhappy in my career from the beginning and I had always been secretly looking for a way out.

In 2016 I was living in Washington, DC and after the presidential election, I started writing again. Writing has always been a lifelong
passion of mine, but there was something about the existential threat of entering this new political era that triggered me to write about my experiences. In March 2017, I took a writing class in DC that made me realize that I could do this as a career.

It was a Novice to Novelist workshop taught by John DeDakis who is a wonderful teacher and a CNN veteran who stopped me after the class to tell me I had a gift. Shortly after that, I realized that I wanted to pursue storytelling full time and I wanted to move back to New York City to do that.

I moved back to New York in May 2017 and I quickly started seeing film sets sporadically set up on random NYC streets and I started to wonder if that was really a world I could see myself in. I’ve always been

very creative and imaginative with storytelling, and I started to realize that the movies I saw in my own mind might actually be able to be made real.

In 2018, I took my first film course at New York University’s Open Arts Program and made my first three short films with a small crew of peers and that changed everything for me. From there it felt like one thing led to another and I began working on film sets and gaining more experience.

I’m still learning and creating as a filmmaker but now that I look back on my journey, and especially the growth and healing work that I did for myself during my quarantine time, I’m grateful for the timing of the chapters and the seasons that have transpired in my life.

Sometimes I wish I started sooner, but I’m always grateful for the opportunity to alchemize all my experiences now to create something I couldn’t have created in the past.

Brittany, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hello! My name is Brittany Quickel, I’m a Psychic, Tarot Reader, and Independent Filmmaker based in New York City.

I was born and raised in Northern New Jersey in an Italian American community where I was taught ancestral healing practices from Italian folk magic traditions that have been passed down from the generations of Italian women in my family.

I’m also a writer, artist, dancer, and storyteller with a passion for supernatural occultism. I’m passionate about visual storytelling and
preserving ancestral folk magic traditions that have been nearly lost within my own family lineage.

I alchemize my psychic and creative gifts to provide my clients with a deeper understanding of their current situation. I specialize in
helping artists and creatives see their own gifts through a psychic lens and overcome creative blocks holding them back from sharing their artistic gifts with the world.

Chiaroscuro is my favorite artistic term which is used to describe a light shining in the dark so I’m here to illuminate aspects of my
clients’ lives that may have been previously unseen, leading to a deeper awareness and understanding of their own creative gifts and
magic.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Yes! I had to pivot my entire life and my business during the pandemic in 2020. I was actually already pivoting my business as a sign language interpreter by that point, I had started my own company called Listen Interpreting in 2019 and I was working on creating my first online course in 2020 when the pandemic hit.

I released this online course in the Summer of 2020 and it wasn’t as successful as I thought it would be at the time. While this was an
upsetting ending, it was secretly a huge relief to me because I had been desperately wanting to retire from my career as a sign language interpreter for a very long time, and the path that I was building for myself logically made a lot of sense at the time as the “safe” option to keep building upon what I knew

But the pandemic gave me a clean slate. Shortly after, I started reading tarot for my friends and family after randomly sharing about
Tarot on my Instagram just on a whim.

All of a sudden I started doing tarot readings for people by request, and that’s when I really learned how psychic I actually was. I started Chiaroscuro Tarot as a business in the Fall of 2020 and by January 2021, I formally retired from my previous career as a sign language interpreter.

If it weren’t for the pandemic giving me some much-needed solitude and causing me to lose the job I felt stuck in for years, I really don’t know what would’ve happened!

Ever since, I’ve learned to be open to all the changes and surprises that the Universe can bring us. Sometimes the winds of change bring chaos that doesn’t make sense to us in the moment, but after some time, we’re able to see clearly how those catalyst events brought us exactly to where we needed to be.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think that in our society, we have a love-hate relationship with artists and with creativity overall. We currently live in a society
where educational funding for the arts is dramatically decreasing every year in schools throughout the country, and while we put artists up on a pedestal as musicians, movie stars, and film directors, people in our society with a lot of power, at the same time we tell young children who want to be artists that they need to have a “back up plan” or that they cannot pursue their creative passions full force as their top priority. I think that we need to change that narrative in our society.

Right now, I think that artists overall need to feel safe. We need time, space, and stability in order to create to the best of our ability.

At the same time, some people are scared of the power that artists can potentially hold in our world. That is why artists have been
historically targeted first during times of totalitarianism and fascism. We saw this in the gothic art and cinema of the German Expressionists who were expressing their truth just before World War II. There are countless examples from global history where artists have been in serious danger for creating their work and still are.

I think in this current day and age, we need to understand that artists are very special people, very special souls who have a very
special perspective to share. We include diversity from all walks of life, and I think, in this day and age, we find that many artists and creatives are also neurodivergent people. People with disabilities, people who have mental illnesses, people who see the world through their own unique lens. Artists who need to be supported by society in a multitude of ways.

When I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 Disorder eight years ago, one of the first things I did was Google “famous people with bipolar
disorder,” and there was this star-studded list that came up on Wikipedia including a lot of famous artists who have changed the world, which gave me a lot of hope at the time to know that I wasn’t alone.

It’s important to remember that artists who are different and neurodivergent have always been here. We are not new, and we’ve always been a part of history. We’ve shaped and changed this world, and we will continue to do so, but given that people are more open minded in this generation, more understanding, and more educated, I believe it’s a priority that we need to understand what artists need today in a more holistic way, because if an artist cannot live in this society, then they will not be able to create their art in order to change this society.

I knew this to be true even before I discovered the full story about the artists and musicians in my Italian family, one of whom died in a tragic way for this very reason, but that is a story that I’ll tell in my first short documentary I’m currently working on.

We must protect especially sensitive and vulnerable artists at all costs! ”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://chiaroscurotarot.com/
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Image Credits
Headshot by Kai Ravelson