Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
January 14, 2020
S7E12: Janelle Monáe
Janelle Monáe is a singer, songwriter, actor, and producer.
Monáe talked about her insistence on developing an independent career as a musician.
I didn’t want to just sign directly to a music distribution company and get swallowed up. I was very afraid of that. And instead, I thought it was important to surround myself with artists that I respect, that I love, that challenged my ideas, that I could grow with, that they could grow with me. I want to create an arts collective and let’s change the world like that. You know, the mainstream hasn’t caught up to the things that we love. Let’s just do it. And until, I kid you not, when we started thinking in that way, that’s when Sean Puffy Combs would come down to Atlanta.
Jessica and Ellen talked to Monáe around the unveiling of A Beautiful Future, a series of short films by women directors she commissioned in partnership with Belvedere vodka.
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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt
Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.
Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.
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