Ooou! Yes, yes. I was 17 years old! I attended a performing arts magnet school in Augusta, GA called Davidson Fine Arts, so as you can imagine there were so many art-based opportunities. I had fallen in love with poetry learning it in middle school, just really something passionate and expressive about that way of communicating. I eventually joined the poetry club, held VP for a year and President for 2 years. There weren’t a ton of performance-based opportunities for the club at the time, so I started producing showcases at the local arts festival and our school festivals and petitioning for more opportunities at school events. We started becoming known locally, and eventually were able to branch out at events outside of our school.

It was a bit difficult sometimes with all of the school permissions and being announced as the “DFA Poetry Club” all the time, so putting some heads together, we rebranded as Unspoken Words, and I founded a spoken word poetry performing group that intersected poetry with other forms of art! This generated some buzz (as we were also quite young) and people started hiring us to come to events.

I believe our very first one was a church conference and we got paid $100 and we used it towards buying and designing our first set of t-shirts!

Hi everyone! I’m Déj! I’m a multi-faceted creative, creator, and creative entrepreneur specializing in creative consulting, direction, and branding (I own a company for this, too, we’ll get to it soon)!

I’ve been in the entertainment industry for 12+ years and consider myself an actor, music artist, and content creator! Some of the things I’m booked for are: live shows, film/tv, voiceover work, commercials, user-generated content, content collaborations, brand collaborations, on-camera talent, showcases, stage work, and other jobs in that field! My current artistic goal centers on expression and healing through storytelling.

I’ve worked in the media industry for 6+ years in creative development and production and graduated from New York University Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama and minors in the Business of Media, Technology, and Entertainment and Producing. My passion for entertaining and performing combined with my love for creating and my experience in production and development gave birth to my company, DDCE Creative Agency.

DDCE Creative Agency is creative consulting agency specializing in creative direction and branding for early stage creatives and their companies! We do anything from brand photography & videography to world building for creative projects (film, music, etc.) to creative consulting on production, execution, etc.

In its totality, our goal is to support creatives all the way around! What really makes us stand out as an agency is that we are “artists helping artists.” Our team is made up of non-exclusive, freelance creatives who we send offers to based on the project’s needs, their expertise and skill set, specialties, availability, and going rate (similarly to a creative job board). Who better than to bring a vision to life and tell stories for creatives than other creatives!

Additionally, DDCE opens the door for creatives to utilize secondary skill sets (while still being in the arts/entertainment/creative field) to make additional income on a non-exclusive basis (which gives them the flexibility to still establish their creative careers), and in the process assist other creatives who are navigating artistic entrepreneurship, creative autonomy, and building their online brand. In my eyes, we are essentially a one-stop shop to bring your creative visions to life.

I was using the term unlearn a lot this year, and the thing I think I’ve come upon now is it’s less about the unlearning and more about the balancing. Everything has its place in our lives, and because I believe in divine timing and divine guidance, I know that everything I’ve learned has played a part in getting me to where I am now.

I look at most things like dials now. So, some lessons I recently realized I need to dial down from 10 was mostly all catered to survival, not even realizing I’ve been in survival mode all my life because that’s what I was taught, and that’s what I seen, and that is DEFINITELY something I know how to do, I will definitely keep my head afloat and make sure I don’t look like I’m ‘just surviving’ (something else we were taught for appearances).

Toning back my “survival dial” brought less anxiety about things I can’t control, less anxiety about a future that hasn’t even occurred in this moment yet, letting go the needs for acceptance by other people, the need to be every place at once, the resistance to stillness, learning how to trust myself and other, and most of all increasing my empathy & vulnerability, and decreasing my defense. It brought softness, and play. Smiling and laughing, and the beauty of life that is right in front of you.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing how to survive because it’s a human instinct that keeps you alive in any setting (physically, socially, culturally, mentally, etc.) but too much of it and you stop experiencing life. You’re just kind of there, and coping.

I think everyone is creative in some form or fashion, usually they just don’t know it. However, I think there’s something powerful in your job being interpreting and observing the world and the people in it. I think there’s something interesting about the fact that majority of narratives that are told are created by artists (especially in all of your media), so artists, essentially, influence the collective consciousness more than anything else. God has placed a little light in each of us as we are always creating something from absolutely nothing, so it is a literal gift to create.

With that being said, most people struggle to understand why we choose such “difficult” and uncertain paths for ourselves. If you were given a gift from God and you knew you had it, would you choose to ignore it or would you do all you could to let the light shine through you? In plainer terms, if we could do anything else and still live a full life, trust me, I think we would.