We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Selena Moshell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Selena below.
Hi Selena, thanks for joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
I have been incredibly fortunate to have been full time in the arts almost directly out of college. I danced through my Environmental Studies degree in a Dance minor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and thought I would get my Ph.D in Marine Conservation after school. I was the director of Animal Services at the Orlando Science Center for six months when I got a call to go dance on a cruise ship, which aligned my love of the ocean with my love of dance perfectly! After I got off the ship I danced and was an aerialist at Walt Disney World for a few years before joining the national tour of the Lion King where I danced for eight and a half years. After retiring from dance, I moved into film and started a production company in LA, and have since managed to work in both film and live events ever since! The secret for me, if there is any, is that no matter where I was I always had jobs in entertainment or entertainment adjacent, no matter the level. For example, when I was in Orlando and dancing at Disney, I also had to dance at every other theme park and a few dinner theater shows to make ends meet. When I moved to LA, before I started my company, I PA’d on any and every set that would have me to get my 10,000 hours. I am lucky in that I didn’t need to have a ‘survival job’ outside of my industry- when I was a dancer, I danced as my side hustle from my main gig, and when I was a director in film and live events, I had side gigs PAing or ADing on other sets to make ends meet. (I still love hopping on a crew to AD to this day! Last week I jumped onto a crew and brought my 9 month old daughter on set with me. It was insanely fun and rewarding!) So I would say to anyone starting out to try to get as many survival jobs IN or ADJACENT to the industry you want to be in. The connections and friendships you make there are priceless. Work hard, stand out in both your work ethic and kindness and you’ll go far.
Selena, 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?
Our production company inhabits this fascinating intersection of filmed and live events. We are able to create and produce seamlessly in both arenas, which I find incredibly gratifying. My business partner brings the experience of having worked on some of the biggest movies of the past few decades (X-Men 3, Fantastic Four, Planet of the Apes to name a few) and I bring my experience of working on Broadway and theatrical shows such as various shows at Walt Disney World, South Pacific and the Lion King. We are able to not only create live shows from the ground up, from creative to logistics, but also create marketing materials such as video packages and photography, and finally we are also able to do large scale live captures. Most recently we provided this wholistic approach to Kenny Loggin’s last live touring show in Santa Barbara, where we assisted in the creative of the live show by creating visuals for the screens, providing IMAG services for the audience (the large screens on the sides of the stage), as well as providing photographic coverage of the show, and finally by filming the entire show with a cinematic team, complete with cable cam and roaming cameras to capture all of the action. We love being able to flow so seamlessly between the live and filmed worlds, and believe that so much magic can happen at this intersection when it’s being led by a cohesive and wholistic approach.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
A big pivot I had to navigate happened when we closed the first national tour of the Lion King. I had been a professional dancer for over 15 years at the time and found myself at the crossroads of retirement, continuing my career as a dancer, or moving into a new field all together. This is a bridge all dancers must cross at some point, as dancing has a limited shelf-life as a career, so I found myself at the ripe ‘old age’ of 34 having to make this huge life shift. Thankfully I had been using my time on tour to explore my hobby of photography, which evolved into filmmaking though the realization that if dance and photography had a baby, it would be film. While on tour I would film and edit music videos and short films for my fellow cast mates, learning the ins and outs of basic videography and editing in the process. When the tour closed, I knew I had to capture the historical moment for my cast and crew, so I shot, directed, and edited a full length documentary about the closing of our beloved show. I got permission from Disney Theatrical (to whom I am forever grateful) to film backstage, capturing moments no one had even been access to before. It was a formative experience for me, teaching me that I not only had the skillset to tell a story in this ‘new’ medium for me of film, but that it would be cohesive, moving, and as fulfilling to me as dancing. That’s when I knew I which road to take moving forward, and how I found myself in LA a few years after leaving tour.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
When I first started directing and working with bigger teams (both in film and live events) I was under the impression that every great, creative idea HAD to originate from me, otherwise I was a failure as a director. I quickly realized this was an untenable goal- that there wasn’t enough hours in the day to create every last piece of a project alone. I also realized that I was lucky enough to be surrounded by many people that brought SO MANY great innovative and creative concepts to the project, and my job was to, quite literally, just DIRECT the ship. I didn’t have to be the carpenter that was sawing the wood to create the hull (to continue the ship metaphor) or even the painter that put the paint of coat on the ship. My job, as the director, is to empower the talented people on the cast and crew to do what they do best for the project at hand, while keeping the over-arcing vision in mind. I love navigating the ships I direct towards the narrative north star at our bow, and getting to cheer on the incredibly talented people I work with to create the best possible project, whether that’s a commercial, short film, documentary, or live event.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mikkomia.com
- Instagram: @mikkomiaproductions