In addition to the multitude of tips and tools we share with artists, we also tackle some of the bigger questions on the minds of artists and people working in the arts. What are the emotional contours of living as an artist? What does the future of the arts look like? How can you be an artist when the whole world is burning?

When Summer Dawn Reyes found herself frustrated trying to get meaty, non-stereotypical Asian and Hispanic acting roles, she realized that one solution was just to write the roles herself. So, she did. Once she realized how valuable it was for her as a woman of color to be able to express herself fully and authentically as a writer and performer, she expanded her vision to help other creative women of color.

One of the major challenges in talking about the environment and climate change is that the scale is almost too big to comprehend. The scale of ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and projected change over decades can feel abstract and overwhelming; too big to really think about and too big to change. Threshold Podcast uses audio as the medium to bring stories about the environment down to a human scale. Through narrative audio work, they highlight the nuances of conversations about the environment and showcase the perspectives of people who are most immediately impacted by environmental issues like oil drilling.

Post-rock composer and guitarist Patrick Grant takes guitars out into the wild. Through Tilted Axes: Music for Mobile Electric Guitars, he brings together musicians to take to the streets of New York City and bring music to the public. With the help of battery-powered amps and inspired by his work as a composer and street theater musician, Patrick Grant uses free public music to help his audience share spontaneous moments of beauty and connection where they least expect it.

When the whole entertainment industry ground to a halt this spring, the team that would eventually become the Lesbian Bar Project was forced to take a pause from their lives as theater, television, and film creators. And when director Erica Rose learned how few lesbian bars still existed in the United States, she knew that she had to do something.

A Sustainable Creative Practice Is Different For Everyone As an artist, you want to build your creative practice in a way that nourishes you and sustains you, that lets you stay inspired and connected. If you run yourself ragged trying to balance out your creative commitments as well as the rest of your life, you’ll find yourself burned out and frustrated. At Fractured Atlas, we want more artists to make more work. And if artists are burned out and frustrated, you’re not able to create! We need to develop sustainable creative practices.

Strange Trace founders Frances Kruske, Erin Matthews, Greg Nahabedian, Joshua Scheid, Elena Stabile, and Felix Aguilar Tomlinson knew that they wanted Strange Trace to bring opera into new, more accessible places. Based in Boston, Strange Trace “seeks to holistically redefine the experience of opera, to create new works in nontraditional venues, and to bring together a community of artists and audiences in a fun and supportive environment where all are welcome.”

Gavilán Rayna Russom has spent most of her life in the nightlife scene. Nightlife is how she has found community, refined her politics, earned a living as a musician and a DJ, and gained a deeper understanding of herself as an embodied being. Her work “fuses theory with expression, nightlife with academia and spirituality with everyday life.” She not only uses synthesizers but also uses synthesis as a structuring principle of her work, "weaving together highly differentiated strands of information and creative material into cogent expressive wholes."

Stock photography is not generally known for being an innovative field. When we think of stock photography we might think of women laughing alone with salads or awkward photos of white businessmen pointing at things.

Denise Shanté Brown didn’t always know that her life’s work would be at the intersection of well-being and design. Through her thesis work in Social Design for her Master’s degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she saw not only the ways that Black women are excluded from decisions about their own health and well-being, but that Black women were able to create their own structures of healing and community. The research process became a healing process for her, as well as a way to explore manifestations of both systemic inequality and resilience in its face.