We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Naima Ramos-Chapman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Naima, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I first knew I wanted to pursue an artistic path professionally when I was very young. Perhaps in the third grade when I wrote a poem inspired by the film Purple Rain. I remember watching that film and oddly feeling so connected to Prince and what felt to me, to be this longing to be seen that could only be expressed through creative expression. I could watch him perform and see him in the way that his higher power saw fit and I knew I wanted THAT. And yes, I knew this at age eight or nine…I submitted that poem which was a haiku in response to this work of Prince’s and I won. I remember feeling so shy and so scared of this hit of validation that I didn’t show anyone my creative writing until I was in my 20s. By then I had dabbled intensely in as many art practices as I could get scholarships for enough to know it wasn’t just a phase or about the external validation that can sometimes come with putting the work out for others to see. I do it professionally because I have to have several hours a day devoted to getting things out on the page, or in a dance studio, or on a set directing…it’s not easy but it’s worth it if you really learn to love the journey. I laugh at my 3rd grade self for shirking away from winning at a poetry contest but I deeply get now what that was about. As an artist “professionalism” is about the business side. About the marketability …and not everything beautiful and true in you that is expressed is going to sell and you have to be ready to face that; to really love yourself enough to know you are an artist that makes work to live and sustain on a spiritual level and then there’s this other material realm where you sell things driven to entertain. Art and commerce are different words for a reason. I wasn’t ready for that duality as a kid so I waited until I was…
Naima, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m an artist from Brooklyn, NY born to two civil rights activists. I had a working class background and my weekends growing up were filled with trips to the museum and movement protests. I trained as a dancer and getting a scholarship to learn how to move at Ailey set me on an artistic and expressive journey but I knew dance wasn’t the way I’d make work exclusively . I became a journalist and really enjoyed the process but I realized I wasn’t a fit so I took my love for writing, dance and my lived experiences and saw film as a way to incorporate all these aspects. I also saw the medium as a liberatory and expressive tool that was essential to bringing imaginative storytelling through collaboration to another level. And into the homes of people who maybe only had access to the broader world through the screen. My mother raised me but so did the films we watched together on TCM. Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart were her favorites while Spike Lee films, Tarantino, and Julie Dash became mine. The lasting impression a story can make on your soul is not to be underestimated. I needed to see more but where people like me—with experiences like the people I loved, were represented. Black, queer, poor, working class, educated, troubled, at peace, all of it. With grace and Dignity. I made my first short film with all of this understanding and desire in 2015, made a short that did very well called AND NOTHING HAPPENED, worked on a Peabody-award winning television show called RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS that was groundbreaking, worked with networks like showtime, Hulu, Amazon, hbo, Starz and others to make television that is smart, reflective, bold and as radical as can be. Most recently I was a writing producer on I’M A VIRGO and soon you’ll see some episodic directing I did on a show I just love called THE OTHER BLACK GIRL. I’m also in development for a few feature films that are in alignment with my mission to inspire young girls to be their full, raw, and authentic selves. What sets me apart from other directors is that I am self-taught, I’m from a truly working class background, and every take I have doesn’t come from any institution. It comes from the heart.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My mission is to create cinematic work that renders the subjective experiences of Black, femme, and queer people like myself with a raw authentic lense that captures in earnest and authenticity what it viscerally feels like to move about the world in struggle, in desire, in love, in dreaming, in excellence, in pain, in life. Some of my favorite films, when I watch them, have led my mind to places that allow me to get more free to be who I am. I want my work to do that for people
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
My first short film AND NOTHING HAPPENED was about a terribly tragic sexual assault I survived in 2013. It was hard to make not only because of the subject material but also because I was advised at the time by my lawyer to not make it as she believed it would make me an unsympathetic victim in the event we ever got to a court. it was a huge risk to put it out but at the time I felt it was more important to make sure this short film was seen by other survivors—more importantly I could not handle another instance where my voice was silenced so I released it. It’s now in the Criterion Collection. And that short has been watched internationally by so many women who’ve come up to me explaining how much it spoke to their feelings about rape and the daily threat of sexualized violence. That short made me realize there was a space for me as an artist and that was worth more than anything. Everything worked out more or less and I was able to have a path of recourse in a court of law AND in the film festival circuit.
Contact Info:
- Website: NaimaRamosChapman.com
- Instagram: @naimaramchap
Image Credits
Alex Mejía