We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Celisia Stanton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Celisia below.

Celisia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

In the Fall of 2020, I hired a financial advisor to help me reach my financial goals. Like many Black folks in the U.S., I don’t have the privilege of generational wealth to fall back on, and have had to take a lot of my own initiative to learn about finances in order to build this wealth for me and my family. So, I found a financial advisor who looked perfect on paper. He came highly recommended, had years of experience working with clients with financial goals very similar to my own, and was even a fiduciary!

What I didn’t know at the time was that my financial advisor would eventually lie and steal my entire life savings – tens of thousands of dollars he’d claimed to have invested for me. I was one of 23 victims of an investment scheme that had defrauded us of a combined total of more than 2.3 million dollars. Suddenly, I was learning first hand what the ‘justice’ in ‘criminal justice’ really meant.

In the months that followed, I found myself obsessively listening to true crime podcasts as a somewhat unexpected coping mechanism. While I’d listened to true crime podcasts in the past, I was now listening to them from my new perspective as a crime victim and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the picture felt incomplete.

I found myself with lots of questions:

Does the story really end with a headline arrest or a guilty verdict? How can we *actually* support victims? And what if the perpetrator, the criminal, is the government? The *same* government that decides what counts as crime in the first place. What does justice *really* mean? And who is it *really* for?

I would complain to my partner about all of these issues and more, until one day he finally said: “Why don’t you just make your own true crime podcast?”

So I did! And in May of 2021, I launched my podcast Truer Crime, a show which seeks to add more research, nuance, context, and questions to the ways we engage with true crime stories. I strive to create a show that dives deep into the root causes of crime, examines the ways the criminal so often fails victims, and challenges us all to imagine how we might start to build a better world. My mission is to shift the way we view, tell, and otherwise engage with true crime stories. I don’t think the answer to problematic true crime content is to stop telling these stories, but rather we should be critically engaging with the ways we can approach these stories with the care, respect, and integrity that they deserve.

Celisia, 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?

Hi! I’m Celisia Stanton, a photographer, high school debate coach, and podcast creator from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I started my photography business in 2016 after picking up a DSLR for the first time to take photos for the summer debate camp I started with my now fiancé, Andrew. Since then, I’ve grown my photography business to a team of amazing associates and second photographers who help me serve more than 50 wedding and portrait clients each year.
I am also the creator and host of “Truer Crime,” a podcast I started from my experience as a financial crime victim, and my personal desire for more ethical true crime media. What makes Truer Crime unique is the ways we seek to go deeper when telling these stories, always pointing to the systems that fail to protect victims and to really question what “justice” actually means. So far we’ve been able to cover traditional true crime cases like Darlie Routier, historical cases like the Tulsa Race Massacre and Joan Little, and lesser-known cases like Josiah Sutton and Michael Johnson/”Tiger Mandingo.” What we’ve found through our episodes is that many people have the same issues with true crime media that I did. It’s been so exciting to see how many people connected with Truer Crime, and how the show has helped people think about true crime media in a more critical and well-rounded way.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As a business owner, I have often heard the advice “don’t mix business and politics.” I’d been warned by multiple coaches and educators that bringing anything deemed “too political” into my business could turn away clients, and greatly impede my business’ success. The trouble was that in my personal life, my politics were a huge part of my identity, social life, community, and general interests. I was on my debate team in high school, and have coached high school debate since I graduated, so I’ve long had an interest and investment in critical thinking, politics, and social issues. Not to mention the fact that I’m a Black Latina woman raised by same-sex parents in the midwest, and I’ve always had a personal investment in racial justice and the liberation of all people. But when it came to my business, I often felt I had to obscure key parts of my identity in order to protect the success of my business. That was until the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered at the hands of police by in the city I called home. While protests erupted around me, I could no longer stay silent and began sharing my beliefs and perspectives on systemic racism, power, and under-taught history on my Instagram account @celisiastanton for the first time. And the best part was folks across the country seemed to resonate with what I had to say. My personal and business platforms grew exponentially in a mere matter of weeks.

As the year went on, I found I was attracting clients that wanted to hire me not despite my political beliefs, but because of them. Many of my clients now are drawn to me and my work because they have felt alienated by a wedding industry that almost exclusively centers and uplifts white, straight, cis, thin couples. I’m thrilled to now be able to serve clients from such diverse backgrounds who are value-aligned with me and my business. Now, I’m of the strong belief that “mixing business and politics” actually has the potential to help the success of a business more than it does to hurt it.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

A misconception I think a lot of people have is that great things are made by super talented, polished creatives. While this may be true down the line, I believe that a person can only learn to be excellent at their craft by *doing* what it is they do. That said, the best creative projects often require a lot of risk, enthusiasm, and trust in oneself. When I first started as a wedding photographer, I had learned how to use a DSLR camera just months before. Looking back at some of my early work, it’s so fun to marvel at how much I’ve been able to improve my skills. When it came to Truer Crime, I didn’t know how microphones worked, let alone how to research for and write a story that could keep listeners engaged for an hour or more. But in both these situations, I knew that I’d found a creative project I believed in and I’d learn whatever I needed to bring these ideas to fruition. And I did! Now that I’m years into my journey as an entrepreneur I think it’s easy to forget those messy beginnings. Even with Truer Crime, I think many folks see the finished, polished project, and don’t realize that I achieved that by jumping before I was ready, and trusting I would be able to figure it out on my way down. So many creative projects are stopped before they’re even given a chance, all because someone didn’t think they were talented/prepared/knowledgeable/skilled enough to execute what they envisioned. The truth is you’ll probably never feel fully *ready* to go after that creative project. But go after it anyway, you might surprise yourself.

Contact Info:

• Website: truercrimepodcast.com AND celisiastanton.com
• Instagram: @truercrimepod AND @celisiastanton
• Facebook: Truer Crime Podcast AND Celisia Stanton Photography
• Twitter: @truercrimepod
• Other: Listen to Truer Crime wherever you get your podcasts!

Image Credits
Celisia Stanton Photography Truer Crime logo and podcast cover art created by Alexis Politz