Celebration Interviews: Tish Arana and Kimber Smith on Belonging, Directing, and the Stories That Name Us

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the last of fifteen conversations from that day.

Actor, writer, and director Tish Arana sits down with development and production executive Kimber Smith. They begin where everyone at the celebration began — comparing how they each found their way to Fanshen.

Kimber through Project Involve at Film Independent, where they were both on the producing track. Tish through One Drop of Love , which moved her enough that she brought her husband back to see it and left with a name for the daughter they'd go on to raise, now ten.

Tish also shares how she came to direct her short film The Burden after her director stepped away two weeks before production, with an all-Black-women team of department heads behind her, and how it turned her into a director. Kimber closes the day with a message for the next generation: you will have every reason to doubt whether you belong, and the resistance you meet is itself the proof that they know you do.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T.

Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.