Feature in Development

A Different Kind of Work

I have spent my career as a set designer in the Art Department — the person who takes a vision and makes it inhabitable — from napkin drawing to reality. I have done that work on major studio productions, on institutional commissions, and on virtual environments built for global audiences. I am good at it. And for a long time, that was enough.

But somewhere in the process of doing that work at the level I have done it — on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, on The Founder, on the Museum of Diversity — I began to understand something. The skills I had developed were not just technical. They were intellectual. I know how to read a story spatially. I know how space carries meaning, how environments tell you who lives in them and what they believe and what they have survived. I know how to make a world feel true.

What I did not yet know was whether I could use those skills to tell my own story. That question has led me here.

Why Now. Why This.

I am a Jamaican-American woman who has spent her professional life in rooms where people who look like me are rarely in charge of the vision. I have been the person who executes. I have been excellent at executing. And I have watched, for years, as the stories that get made — the ones with real budgets, real distribution, real reach — are not often stories that begin where mine begins.

There is something that happens when you are a woman of Caribbean heritage moving through the world’s creative industries. You develop a particular kind of awareness. You notice whose stories are considered universal and whose are considered niche. You notice which experiences are treated as the default of human feeling and which are treated as specific, limited, particular. You learn to translate yourself constantly — to make your perspective legible to rooms that were not built with you in mind.

At some point, that awareness stops being something you manage and starts being something you can use. I reached that point. And I decided to use it.

Moving Into Writing and Production

Writing is terrifying in a way that set design never was. Set design has a brief. You start from someone else’s story, and you find the physical truth of it. Writing means generating the story yourself — the premise, the characters, the stakes, the argument, the whole thing. There is no brief. There is only what you believe is worth saying.

Production is a different kind of responsibility. It means being accountable not just for the work but for the conditions in which the work happens — who is in the room, how decisions are made, what it costs, and who bears that cost. I have watched enough productions from the inside to know what I would do differently. Now I have to prove I can actually do it.

Both of these things — writing and producing — are a repositioning. Not just of my career but of my understanding of what I am for. I spent years building worlds. I am now learning how stories envelop us. Those are related skills, but they are not the same skill, and the gap between them is where this project lives.

What I Can Tell You

I have an original feature in development. I am not yet ready to talk about what it is — there is work still to be done, and collaborators still to be confirmed, and I will share more when it is right to share more. What I can say is that it comes from a place I know deeply. It is a story that could only have been written by someone who has lived where I have lived and seen what I have seen.

That is either a limitation or a strength. I have decided it is a strength.

For Anyone Watching This

I am not an established writer. I am not an established producer. I am a set designer who is learning — with real stakes, in real time — how to step into something she is not yet sure she can do. I am figuring it out as I go, which is frightening, and also the most alive I have felt in my creative life in years.

If you are someone who has a thing you want to make and you are not sure you are the right person to make it: I cannot tell you it is not scary. It is. I can tell you that the fear does not mean stop. It means you are doing something real.

I will update this space as the project develops — as collaborators come on board, as the work takes its shape, as the story earns its right to be told. Come back. There will be more here.