Sista Brunch

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 fourteenth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Actor, writer, and producer Lanett Tachel sits down with actor and producer Hari Williams for her first Sista Brunch. Lanett describes the moment she felt most seen: Angie's Cure, made with her team at New Breed Entertainment and shot across South LA and Leimert Park with everything they had, entered at Dances With Films on the last possible day...

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 thirteenth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Director Jade-Jenise Dixon — who also appears in Volume 4 of this series — sits down with actor, writer, and producer Lanre Idewu. They've been crossing paths since the wrap party for Jade's first feature Truth Hall, where Lanre was the only person on the DVD bonus material who named how much work it must have taken. He knew because he was alre...

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 twelfth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Filmmaker Rraine Hanson — born in Kingston, based in LA, working across the union art department as set dresser, prop master, and production designer while making his own work — sits down with actor and producer Hari Williams. Rraine heard about Sista Brunch at the Black Indie Ignite summit the day before and came because our language named Black women and gend...

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 eleventh of fifteen conversations from that day.

Our drop-in co-host Shawn Pipkin-West — a director and UPM who was a Sista Brunch guest twice before joining us behind the mic — sits down with her friend Janean Jeffries, an executive assistant. Asked what they believed five years ago and no longer do, Shawn says she believed she had to be perfect. What replaced it is a practice of sayi...

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 tenth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Charisma Justice and Michelle Turner joined us through our talent producer Kamesha Rodriguez, and gave us one of the most candid conversations of the day. Asked when she last felt truly seen, Charisma says she isn't there yet — she's mid-career-change and planning a cross-country move, living in what she calls the pre stage. Her definition of arriving has nothing to...

This is our first collaboration episode. We teamed up with Consider This for Comfort, the award-winning podcast hosted by Eteng Ettah, to welcome back Hillman ahead of A Different World's premiere on Netflix on Thursday, September 24.

In the first half, Eteng and Fanshen talk about what the original series meant to them and to a generation of Black viewers. They get into the case for a sequel in an era of reboots, and why Felicia Pride as showrunner matters. They also talk about the state of Black Hollywood, and where to find and support our stories beyond...

Fanshen Cox and guest co-host Christabel Nsiah-Buadi welcome writer, director, and producer Felicia Pride to Sista Brunch for the first remote-recorded episode during COVID-19. Pride traces her path from marketing and posting poetry online to freelance journalism, grad school, book publishing, and authoring six books, including The Message, before a seven-year pause from writing while running a marketing consultancy. After burnout and a layoff in film distribution, she recommitted to screenwriting, publicly reclaimed her identity as a writer, and built her career through classes, coaching, and strategic work. Pride discusses marketing as sharing one’s journey, hiring a publicist, im...

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 ninth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Four-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning bilingual producer Geraldine Porras sits down with Liz Franco, Manager of Original Documentary Series at Netflix. Geraldine shares what it was like to co-executive produce We Need to Talk About Cosby with W. Kamau Bell — an intimidating subject that required holding space for survivors to tell their own truths, and surfacing why coming forward is...

Hanelle Culpepper is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for "Exodus," the season two finale of Paradise on Hulu. She is the second Black woman ever nominated in that category.

So we are bringing back our 2020 conversation with her, with a new introduction from Fanshen recorded ahead of the ceremony.

In this episode, Hanelle tells Fanshen Cox and Anya Adams how she became the first woman to launch a Star Trek series in the franchise's history. One meeting. No script. A weekend to build a look book. Then Patrick Stewart's...

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 eighth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Award-winning filmmaker Tamika Lamison sits down with Kai Bowe, Director of Current Programming, Unscripted at the Oprah Winfrey Network. Tamika's message to the next generation: know your power, and treat perfection as poison — what we do is magic, so make magic and make mistakes. Kai explains why imposter syndrome has never applied to her, then shares the hardest lesson of...

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 seventh of fifteen conversations from that day.

Diana Williams — CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, previously Creative Development and Franchise Producer for Star Wars at Lucasfilm — sits down with Liz Franco, a documentary executive at a major streamer. They talk about small victories that renew hope, including a first trip to the Creative Arts Emmys and the experience of looking around a room and not seei...

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 sixth of fifteen conversations from that day.

LMU film student Kalle White sits down with Daria Strachan, a Black Girls Film Camp alum we first met at Essence Festival 2024. Kalle talks about how a year of injuries reshaped her thinking about disability and how much of the world is inaccessible — and about the early decision rejection that devastated her before it redirected her. Daria makes the ca...

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 fifth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Poet, author, speaker, and actor Arielle Estoria — author of The Unfolding — sits down with writer, engineer, and Made For More Entertainment founder Daniel K. Hunter. The card asks about the first creative spark. Arielle explains why she spills instead of writes, why ideas leave us if we don't foster them, and how recording her audiobook revealed the real difference betw...

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 fourth of fifteen conversations from that day.

Screenwriter, script consultant, and founder of The Professional Pen Shannan Johnson sits down with director Jade-Jenise Dixon (Truth Hall), newly elected co-chair of the DGA Women's Steering Committee. They talk about the money maze facing entrepreneurs — grants built for nonprofits, sponsorships that require a different hustle — and Shannan makes her case for why multi-hyphenates should master one lane before spre...

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 third of fifteen conversations from that day.

Actor and writer Candace Nicholas-Lippman — whose one-woman show A Rose Called Candace was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon's JuVee Productions — sits down with writer C. Craig Patterson. Candace shares the moment Viola Davis told her "you betrayed yourself" and what it revealed about the people she'd been carrying. Craig tells the story of applying to Columbia with a tr...

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

Line producer and Hudson Philmore founder Maegan Philmore (Season 4) sits down with writer-director E'lon Joi, founder of Black Film Allegiance (Season 1). The card asked: when did you feel the most invisible, and what did you do to reclaim space? Maegan talks about being treated as a diversity checkbox, telling a network to say Black when they mean Black, and how therapy...

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

USC film and television production freshman Addison Belhomme — who launched her own production company at 13 and directed two short films with First Lady Michelle Obama at 15 — trades questions with writer, director, producer, and actor Tamika Lamison. They talk about walking away from money that compromises your values, debunking the myth that Black and culturally specific material doesn't sell, and the moments that...

Pull up a chair. This is Sista Brunch.

Sista Brunch is a weekly podcast sharing the stories of Black women and Black gender-expansive people thriving in film, TV, and media. Hosted by Fanshen Cox (she/they), co-author of the Inclusion Rider, the show is seven seasons and 140+ episodes deep — and still growing.

Every week, our guests pull back the curtain. How they broke in. What their projects really cost. What they earn, and how they negotiate. The tools they can't work without. And the advice they'd give their younger selves.

This trailer features th...

Four years running, the most-watched films on streaming have been led by Women of Color. So why is Hollywood still treating diverse stories as a risk?

On this bonus episode of Sista Brunch, we sit down with Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón and Jade Abston, two of the researchers behind UCLA's Hollywood Diversity Report, to break down what the 2026 data actually shows about who gets to lead, direct, write, and who's actually watching.

Dr. Ramón runs UCLA's Entertainment and Media Research Initiative and has spent more than two decades studying equity in Hollywood. Jade Abston is...

Show Notes

How does an "army brat" with no Hollywood connections become an Emmy-winning documentarian whose work sits at the center of one of the most urgent conversations in America? In this bonus brunch, filmmaker Luchina Fisher pulls up a chair to talk about the long, unexpected road from journalism to the director's chair—and the craft, ethics, and relationships that carry a story from the page to the screen to the front lines.

Luchina is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, educator, and 2026 North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame inductee. She's the director behind the ne...

What's Greeking? What's a Frankenbite? What does it mean to "package" a project? And why does a Hollywood producer call a sewing machine her most important piece of technology?

In this Sista Brunch Season 7 bonus episode, every guest shares the tool, term, or technology from their craft that an outsider would never understand. From set dressing to composing, from location management to unscripted TV editing, from documentary law to the future of AI -- this is the insider language of the entertainment industry, decoded by the people who use it every day.

Fourteen guests. Fourteen...

How much do you really make in film, TV, and media? Fourteen Sista Brunch guests break the industry's biggest taboo and talk real money — the actual rates, salaries, and budgets behind the careers. You'll hear what a producer's cut of a budget really looks like (and why it's the first thing studios cut), how one executive learned a white colleague was earning six figures more for the same level of work, what showrunners pull in a week, how an independent journalist funded a whole TV show, what composers and location managers actually charge, and why one producer took a jo...

While working as one of Sista Brunch's season seven associate producers, Charlie T. Savage was quietly making a feature film. Voices the Musical is a 1967 period piece with nine original songs, shot in nine days in Inglewood, now nominated for Best US Narrative Feature and Best Screenplay at the 30th Annual ABFF.

In this bonus episode, Charlie shares the full journey -- co-writing the script in one month, fighting against the musical format (and being wrong), shooting a period piece with stunts and a 1965 car on a shoestring budget, and why networking across rather than up is...

Effie T. Brown is an award-winning producer, CEO of Game Changer Films, and a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her producing credits include Real Women Have Curves and Dear White People, and she made history when she challenged the lack of diversity on HBO's Project Greenlight -- a moment that helped spark the creation of the Inclusion Rider.

In this season seven finale of Sista Brunch, Effie delivers one of the most transparent and unfiltered conversations we've ever had:

-- Growing up as a latchkey kid in New Jersey and...

In our Season 7 finale, Effie T. Brown holds nothing back. The CEO of Gamechanger Films and producer of Real Women Have Curves, Dear White People, and The Inspection tells the full Project Greenlight story — and learns, for the first time on mic, that her stand on inclusive hiring is the spark behind the Inclusion Rider and the state-level policy that grew out of it. From there she gets real about money: what she actually earned on her best-known films, why producers have to stop deferring their fees, and how she nearly lost her house between projects. Then she turns to...

Diana Williams is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, a multi-platform venture studio building franchise IP across film, TV, video games, and immersive experiences. She is the former Creative Development and Franchise Producer for Star Wars at Lucasfilm, where she co-founded ILM Immersive -- the lab behind Vader Immortal and the Academy Award-winning Carne y Arena.

In this conversation, Diana shares her path from a farm community in New Jersey to Georgetown to becoming the youngest person ever admitted to the DGA Assistant Directors Training Program, to building franchise worlds at Lucasfilm, to launching her...

Ashlee Hypolite is the Executive Director of Hollywood CPR, the nonprofit workforce development program that provides free, union-track training for below-the-line careers in film, TV, and live events.

In this conversation, Ashlee shares her journey from Trinidadian roots in Boston to Brandeis to CAA to leading one of the most impactful pipeline programs in the industry. She breaks down how Hollywood CPR works, what the union local numbers mean, the real cost of entry (free), and why below-the-line careers are one of the most viable and most overlooked paths into entertainment. She also talks about philanthropy, nonprofit...

Aaliyah Williams is an Emmy Award-winning producer and founder of Just a Rebel. She produced Netflix's Black Barbie, which earned two Daytime Emmys and an NAACP Image Award through Shondaland.

In this conversation, Aaliyah shares her full journey -- from Harvard to finance to moving to LA without a film degree, from assisting for Effie Brown to producing a first short on 35mm that ended at Sundance, from building digital platforms at All Def Digital and MACRO to the real story behind how Black Barbie got to Netflix. She breaks down what it took to negotiate a...

Kamala Avila-Salmon is a producer, studio executive, and inclusion strategist who has been at the center of how stories get developed and greenlit at major studios. She is the founder of Kas Kas Productions and previously led inclusive content strategy at Lionsgate, where she was embedded in creative development, marketing, and the greenlight committee.

In this episode, Kamala breaks down the real mechanics of the entertainment industry with rare transparency:

-- How "packaging" works and why studios expect producers to arrive with director, cast, and script already attached

Journalist and media innovator Georgia Fort joins Fanshen and Shawn for a powerful conversation about her journey from radio intern to Emmy-nominated independent journalist — and why she's dedicating her career to building the next generation of storytellers.

Georgia takes us inside the Derek Chauvin trial courtroom, talks about her transition from radio to TV news, and shares the deeply personal story of being detained by federal agents while doing her job. She also breaks down the business challenges facing independent journalism and why she founded the Center for Broadcast Journalism to invest in young journalists of color in...

Guest: Marie Douglas

Titles: Composer; arranger; educator; musical director; conductor; freelance creative

Episode Theme: What it takes to build a career as a Black woman composer and why preparation, musical range, and real relationships matter in film, TV, and beyond.

Why this matters right now: Composers shape how stories feel, but they are still one of the least visible roles in entertainment. In this episode, Marie Douglas breaks down how she found her way into composition, what filmmakers should understand before hiring a composer, and why Black women need to be seen, supported...

Guest: Kai Bowe

Titles:Titles: Director of Current Programming, Unscripted, at OWN; showrunner; story producer; documentarian; screenwriter; former attorney

Episode Theme: How a nonlinear path through law, writing, and unscripted television can turn into real creative authority and why career longevity requires both craft and inner work.

Why this matters right now: At a time when so many creatives are chasing unstable pipelines, Kai Bowe offers a blueprint with range. This episode breaks down the real mechanicsof unscripted TV, the money behind it, the difference between freelancing and network life, and why learning...

Guest: April Reign

Titles: Creator of #OscarsSoWhite; media futurist; strategist; speaker; consultant; former attorney

Episode Theme: What happens when sharp cultural critique becomes industry impact and why real equity requires more than optics.

Why this matters right now: As awards season keeps asking who gets recognized, April Reign reminds us that representation is not a trend, it is infrastructure. This episode digs into the origin of #OscarsSoWhite, the work of changing systems from the inside, and why Black communities cannot afford to sit out conversations about AI, access, and the future of media.<...

Rraine Hanson is a Jamaican transdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker exploring queer identity, mixed media storytelling, and worldbuilding across film and art department craft.

In this Season 7 conversation, we discuss growing up in Kingston, studying film at Emerson College, working in production design and art department, and creating Transcend — a short film about a Jamaican father raising a trans child with care and intention. We also talk about fundraising as an independent filmmaker, queer representation in Caribbean cinema, and what “experimental” filmmaking actually means.

Sista Brunch is a Webby-nominated podcast centering Black women and Black gender...

Guest: Kelly Harris

Titles: Supervising Location Manager; Locations & Production Logistics Leader

Episode Theme: Locations aren’t just “where you shoot”—they’re how production actually happens. Kelly breaks down the creative + logistical power of the locations department, from scouting to permits to managing entire neighborhoods.

Why this matters right now: With tighter budgets, shorter seasons, and new formats like verticals, productions need smarter location strategy more than ever—and Black women need visibility in the roles that quietly run the industry.

Kelly Harris is the kind of industry pro who makes th...

Guest: Asha Chai-Chang

Titles: Filmmaker; Director; Producer; Accessibility Advocate; Founder, Funding Your Foundation

Episode Theme: What happens when a filmmaker learns to fund their own path using finance, community, and strategy as creative tools.

Why this matters right now: As traditional pathways shrink and industry access tightens, creatives are being forced to understand money, infrastructure, and ownership. Asha breaks down how financial literacy, accessibility, and self-investment create real leverage, not just opportunity.

Asha Chai-Chang didn’t enter the industry through one door, she built several. From political science at Ya...

What does it really take to survive — and shape — Hollywood as a Black woman executive?

In this intimate, mentorship-driven conversation, Karen Horne reflects on motherhood, leadership, money, and the invisible labor Black women carry while building entire ecosystems inside the film and television industry.

From running major studio diversity and talent pipelines to being laid off during industry “restructuring,” Karen speaks candidly about power, pay inequity, coalition-building, and why Hollywood’s progressive image has never guaranteed real equity. She also shares how nurturing writers, executives, and creatives shaped her leadership style — and why stepping away from co...

Felicia D. Henderson has built a career most writers only dream of — and she’s still expanding.

In this episode of Sista Brunch, the Emmy-nominated writer, director, and showrunner joins us for a grounded, honest conversation about what it really takes to build longevity in television without letting the industry box you in. From navigating power rooms as a Black woman to making the leap from showrunning into directing, Felicia shares what she’s learned — and what she wishes more creatives were told earlier.

We talk about her directorial debut, The Rebel Girls, a short film tha...

In this Season 7 pre-launch bonus episode, we sit with filmmaker Praise Odigie Paige, whose short film Birdie is playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, to talk about quiet storytelling, risk, faith, and what it takes to make the work you believe in — even when the odds feel stacked.

This conversation is a reminder that there is power in patience, in subtlety, and in choosing yourself as an artist.

TV history in the making! Sheila Ducksworth, executive producer of Beyond the Gates—the first one-hour soap with a predominantly Black cast—joins us to share how she brought her lifelong vision to life.

We talk about how the CBS/NAACP partnership came to be, Sheila's career journey from economics major to entertainment exec, and what it means to build with purpose and impact in TV. She also shares a brilliant tech tip, brunch stories, and advice for her younger self.

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