Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to KendraRenee Sanders. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

KendraRenee, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was three years old I was watching the news and I told my mom I wanted to be on TV like Carmen Harlan and she told me that was a news anchor. I was like ok then I wanna be a news anchor, a couple weeks later we were watching a movie and I told her I wanted to be a news anchor like Angelina Jolie. She told me that, Angelina was an actress who played in movies. Then that sparked it, I from then on I was telling everyone who’s ear I could bend that I was gonna be on the big screen one day.

KendraRenee, 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?

I am an actress, writer, director, producer everything you can think of that involves film. From an early age I wanted to do film, finally in high school is when I got formal training at THE Detroit School of Arts as well as training on and behind the stage. I matriculated to college where I majored in theatre arts and minored in Electronic Media Film Studies. I believe that as an actress/writer I believe it’s important to have knowledge of both disciplines (stage and screen) to be the best. My motto is to tell the stories of people who’s stories would otherwise go untold. That being said with my art I just always want people to feel seen, validated, and represented. Growing up I didn’t see many people that looked like me or grew up like me, but as I became an adult I started seeing more. The edification of how that made me feel is a feeling everyone deserves.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think the best thing society could do is respect it. So many people consume art but don’t really respect artists, especially the independent artists. Like when people say, “Oh they a sound cloud rapper” as if the distributor qualifies it as good music. Then on the other side of it we have people that say “oh I’m not about to buy that music/shirt/movie they aint nobody” so it’s like when will the community realize that you have to do one or the other so that we can be that artist that is mainstream.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I low-key hate talking about this but it’s very important to my story it just gets me emotional. I always said when I got out of college I was gonna be in a movie and my career would begin to take off. However, I did not anticipate what would happen during college. I lost someone close to me every year of college with my final year being the passing of my father. That knocked me down for sure, but I was still going to be apart of a movie a friend from college was doing so things were looking up. Then 12 months and three days after my father passed my mother passed. I was a zombie I was doing things to keep me busy, even some auditioning but I was in such a dark place that rejection for a role made me feel like life was rejecting me. Took me a long while, but I finally got out that hole and was finally seeing light again and decide “yea, imma make a movie!” Not because I thought it would be easy, but because I knew I could, always said I would and realized time is not on my side. That if I wanted all that my parents poured into me to be worth something I was gonna have to do it now because I could wake up one day, with a random terminal illness and regret all the time I didn’t use on making me happy.

Contact Info:

• Website: twentysomethingsthemovie.com
• Instagram: iam_kendrarenee, 20somethingsthmovie, itsakreneeproduction
• Facebook: KendraRenee Sanders
• Twitter: iamkendrarenee, 20somethingsth1
• Youtube: 20somethingsthemovie

Image Credits
ImagesByMichelle