Portrait en Rouje: Sienna Miles Fekete
Sienna is a producer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is one of the Co-founders of Chroma, a cross-disciplinary creative studio founded in 2017 along with her two partners June Canedo and Ladin Awad. Their platform hopes to diversify industries and create spaces that centers on raising consciousness around the experiences of womxn of color in the arts and media.
I met Sienna on a Friday morning in her cosy, sun bathed apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. She made me tea, we sat in her window on her couch and exchanged ideas on starting one’s own platform for change, collaboration, sustainability in the media and the importance of mothers.
Photography by Milah Libin for Speciwomen
© Milah Libin
“For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, “a room of one’s own”, preferably one with a key and a lock.”— Alice Walker.
Philo Cohen for Speciwomen: I love that Alice Walker quote on Chroma’s November 2018 newsletter. Changing the world requires time, money and space. You are actively involved in your mission while simultaneously getting your masters in Art & Public Policy from NYU, how do you balance it all?
Sienna Fekete: I applied to the program with full transparency and even celebration of Chroma in my application so all of my professors know. Everyone is coming in with ‘something’, trying to shape their curriculum around it. We get mentorship from all the professors and all that they do. It’s been really beautiful. Last November I did a climate crisis incubator at CultureHub with Chroma and my professor was so excited because she herself is a poet and climate activist. She told me it was great how it fed into everything that I was working on and we could talk about it in our class too. It is like a symbiosis: the bubble of academia coming into real life practice.
PC: You’re also in constant collaboration with your two Co-founders for Chroma. Can you speak a little bit on working in collaboration with others on a partnership level?
SF: The principle of the collective is beautiful. Ladin [Awad] and June [Canedo] are also always traveling and both of them have learned to balance it all out as well. They often travel to Brazil and Sudan, and we do conference calls in three different time zones. The ability to share that responsibility of work and how we are going to get things done is split between three people. Sometimes one person has more availability to pick things up or someone can jump on this or that, so it's never falling completely on you and it feels more manageable.
PC: How did you meet Ladin and June?
SF: We met through our extended community of friends in New York. I met Ladin at The New School and June through a trip to Storm King sculpture park.. We wanted to chronicle stories about women of color in different creative industries. As I work in radio and podcasting, we aligned on the vision of working with audio for the project. It quickly became bigger than a podcast, bigger than a conference, it became a collective. Now we are a business, officially an LLC. It progressed quite quickly.
PC: Can you speak a little bit on the podcast as a media, the idea of sounds to transmit information and people’s relationship to it?
SF: I think radio and audio have always been my medium because it feels so intimate. Especially living in metropolitan areas, everyone is commuting, everyone is taking the train. One has their headphones on, doing their thing, and yet you can have this intimate experience of storytelling with them. It feels deeply personal, as if you were in the room with that person. That's how I always feel and I think that’s what's great about podcasting. Moreover, it's such an accessible non-elitist and non-hierarchical platform. Anyone can make a podcast. I know there are some that get more funding and that are backed by larger institutions but anyone can actually make a podcast and upload it to SoundCloud. I just love that it’s universal in that way.
PC: How do you curate? What do you want to talk about the most?
SF: Something we talk a lot about at Chroma is our intention. Why are we getting people together? What are we trying to get into that isn't just content to crank out? What am I trying to say? Who am I trying to reach? And what about this is actually interesting and new? It's really hard to be original because we are pulling from our ancestors, our predecessors, and everyone who has ever been an artist in their life. What about this feels deeply personal? What is coming directly from the community we are a part of? We always call on friends and other artists asking them what's something that you want to see, what should we be talking about, what feels relevant to us right now?
PC: In terms of panels and conferences, do people usually reach out to you? What is your process?
SF: In the past, for conferences we've reached out to people because we’ve set up what is thematically going on then created conversations from that. Based on our interests, I often want to do something around what's happening in the music industry and representation, or rather lack of representation, in underground music spaces.. I love music, sound art and the platform of radio. For our Chroma conferences it’s a combination of us reaching out to our friends who are artists but we also do open calls. For example, for this past thing we did with the climate crisis incubator at CultureHub, we posted an open call online on Instagram and got a bunch of proposals. We then whittled it down to the ones we felt were the most developed and made the most sense for the timeline. We continue to collaborate with artists and even other collectives, which has been really powerful. In 2018, we partnered with a Miami based collective called (F)EMPOWER during Art Basel. We curated a whole series of conversations, archived it and added it to our podcast series CHROMA RADIO. It was important for us to partner with a collective that is based in the city we’re doing programming in that is actually a part of the community there. Working with other women of color-led collectives is one of the ways we can collaborate and grow in every city we go to.
PC: How has the project moved and morphed over the years?
SF: We’ve grown so much. Working with friends can be very challenging, some people can’t work together, so I feel very lucky that we have a good dynamic. There is a lot to navigate and consider when you are bringing friendship and personal artistic passions together with business. Finding a balance is key. I think we’ve learned a lot over the couple years we’ve been doing this. We started in the summer of 2017. A lot has come out and our cadence has changed. We used to be so fast, too fast. We put our first conference together in the winter of 2017. We had ten different talks, tons of people coming, we were at 8Ball Community, it was totally DIY. Four months later we had our second conference at Knockdown Center, over 30 different women of color speaking. It was a huge venue we were working with an aromatherapist, set designers, curating the space, and had over 600 people come. We worked so fast, we needed to breathe, and make sure we were not exhausting ourselves so the project can be sustainable.
PC: How do you manage to keep it at a pace that works for all of you and still fulfill the goals you set for Chroma?
SF: We got written up in The New York Times. The New York Times is the paper that everybody in New York and beyond reads —even grandmas read The New York Times. After that, we started getting a lot of inquiries and realized we cannot say yes to everything. We need to be thinking about what we are trying to do rather than just doing things for exposure. That article was really the first press that we agreed to do. We wanted to make sure our story is being told correctly.
PC: Can you speak a little bit upon the importance of community for you, reflecting on your upbringing specifically?
SF: I grew up in an absolutely matriarchal environment so I had a really good sense of female leadership. My mom is a single mom. She raised me. She's an artist herself. She's a dancer, so I had a really good foundation allowing me to understand the strength and power of women. That's very much a part of all of our stories, all of our moms are really important to us. I think what's really beautiful is that we come from different cultures. I am Caribbean and my mom is Canadian, Ladin is Sudanese by way of the Bay Area and June is Brazilian and grew up in the South. There are overlaps in our stories but also cultural differences that allow us to learn from one another, to honor our families and our heritages.
PC: What do you think has changed in the last few years and in New York that makes it more or less accessible to start collectives, and take on their activism to the next step?
SF: I think people are finally having more transparent conversations around money and people getting paid properly. Especially black women, indigenous women and other women of color. For so long it’s been like an elephant in the room that no one talked about. Getting compensated for one’s ideas or creativity was oftentimes inaccessible for a lot of people. The classic situation of women’s ideas being stolen, not credited and not monetarily seen is very common. I think people are calling that out more. I’ve seen a lot of success through social media; no one wants to be called out publicly especially big companies so I think people are having a higher sense of accountability which is important. At Chroma, we’ve learned the power of free space. Space is so hard to come by in New York, especially for conferences for example. For us, we did our first conference with 8 Ball Community and then at Knockdown Center. Both of them offered us free space. These were not money making events. Having that free space allowed us to do the conferences and have all these incredible conversations, so many people came, and connections were made.
PC: The live events really do complete the online dialogues and experience.
SF: I was thinking about how to make space more accessible, especially in a city that is insular like New York. I’d also love for those spaces to eventually be more intergenerational, not having just millennials, but also elders, young folks in the room. The space would feel more dynamic and the power of the archive would be greater.
PC: Do you archive everything that happens live?
SF: Yes. For every event we do, we record and have a podcast of it. It lives online for people to listen to who aren't able to be there in person. We also take photos, we capture videos. We are really trying to self-archive and tell our own stories and take up space in that way. It’s great that we have this material both for ourselves and to add to the collective archive of our community to amplify our stories.
This interview was conducted as part of Speciwomen’s partnership with Rouje.
© Milah Libin