U-M Creative Currents

Exploring Creative Careers: Meet the 2024-2025 Residents (Part 2)

• Season 3 • Episode 6

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, we introduce listeners to the 2024-2025 Creative Careers Residents—Leah Crosby, Kara Roseborough, and sara faraj. Host Mark sits down with each resident to discuss their work, creative processes, and upcoming projects. From audio storytelling and jazz ballet to participatory photography, these artists and scholars are pushing boundaries in their respective fields.

Featured Guests & Projects:

  • Leah Crosby (MFA, Stamps School of Art & Design) – Crosby’s project is titled "Three Times as Tightly" and is a three-part audio work that uses marine animals as symbols to explore human attachment and identity formation. The three chapters include The Anglerfish, The Axolotl, and The Marine Iguana.

  • Kara Roseborough (MFA in Dance, SMTD) – Roseborough is developing a jazz ballet “La Vie en Rose,” which chronicles the journey of a small-town Black waitress with dreams of dancing in New York City. The piece examines issues of race and gender as they pertain to an artist’s journey and incorporate the history of Black people in southeast Michigan.

  • sara faraj (Master of Urban & Regional Planning, Taubman College) – Faraj facilitated Photovoice workshops in 2024-2025 to cultivate space for liberatory education and collective reflection for social change. The Photovoice methodology, which was developed by Caroline C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris, includes photography training, ethical considerations of photography, direction and narrative development through reflection and collaborative activities.

Relevant Links:


Season 3, ep. 5: Leah Crosby, Kara Roseborough, Sara Faraj (Part 2)

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[00:00:05.857] Mark Clague:
I'm here with our three 24-25 creative careers residents for the Arts Initiative. And we have Leah Crosby, Kara Roseborough, and Sara Faraj. Just talk about what this year has been like for you and how important it is in your own development.

[00:00:22.812] Leah Crosby:
Sure. So for my project, I'm making a 90-minute, three-part experimental audio storytelling work with an accompanying letter-pressed artist book that is looking at sort of identity co-formation and three marine animals as like lenses for how weird it is to be a person at its most simple. So this project is extremely personal. The stories are very small. They're really intimate and they go a lot of different places and it has been, I don't think I would have made work like this within the container of an MFA program because it has been very helpful to be given resources and then trusted to use those resources to make good work without people necessarily checking in on a weekly or a monthly basis like show us what you're making show us what you're making and we're going to tell you about it and tell you how to maybe change it which was very much how graduate school was which is all you know why we elected to come here that served its purpose for sure and it's also been helpful in the immediate wake of that to have more freedom and less hand-holding and more more trust maybe I mean, that makes it sound like they didn't trust us in grad school, but more openness around the creative process. I think I've made work that feels a lot more personal that I think I would have had more, I know I would have had more shame about sharing regularly, I think especially because it feels something that I struggle with making art in this moment with my intersectional identities of privilege that sometimes I feel it can feel bad to tell small stories. And that's like a feeling that I've been working with and thinking about and pushing back against also in the art itself.

[00:02:17.092] Mark Clague:
Yeah. So to get into those really deep issues, you have to have time. And I think that's probably one of the things that we hope anyway, that the residency does. So just so everybody knows, I mean, it pays a salary for about nine months, right? It's sort of halftime officially, I think, but halftime enough to to provide some benefits as well so you guys have health care. So we want to support you. But the money is one thing, but it's really the gift of time to go deep into those things. But I totally hear you that telling something small is important, but you have to have the time to go deep into that sort of micro moment.

[00:02:52.509] Leah Crosby:
Sure. And another thing that we're doing is we're all teaching workshops. And those workshops have been very much up to ourselves to determine. And that has also been a huge freedom in graduate school teaching. you never have the chance to just like choose what you're going to teach. So it's been really incredible to think about like, okay, you know, what are areas in my CV that I want to build up a little bit more? Like what are some skills that I feel I uniquely have that the university community might benefit from? And also like how can those workshops be related to the current creative work that I'm making? So that's also been like a real freedom and a real gift to be able to self-design educational workshops and to be able to engage with the university community in a more meaningful way.

[00:03:38.098] Mark Clague:
And I can say those workshops are really important to us at the Arts Initiative because they're part of how we engage the community and really convince people that the arts are for everybody, right? Not just for the geniuses, right? Kara, tell us a little bit about your experience.

[00:03:51.812] Kara Roseborough:
Yes. So I'll actually start with the workshops since that's fresh in my brain and just thinking about the opportunities that I've had. So during my graduate studies, I was a graduate student instructor. I taught a plethora of including intro to ballet. I taught a ballet class for the Take Care series as well. And that was really fun and great. But probably the class that I was most excited to teach was Bomba. I got to study Bomba during my time as a student within the Center for World Performance Studies. I did the certificate program, got to travel to Puerto Rico and study it there. I also was part of an informal Bomba group that was created by Javier Torres, who was in the music department and did that for a couple of years. But it was really great to turn around and actually have to learn how to teach this. And in doing so, I was connected through Arts Initiative with Professor Osvaldo Rivera, who has a bomba group in Detroit, Reconstruction. Everyone should go check them out. And he actually came and attended my workshop and drummed for us at the end. And it was just a really beautiful experience, especially for myself personally, considering the political climate and how soon after the election it was, it was just really great to be in a space that was honoring some of our shared ancestors and also just a dance form that is about liberation, self-expression, and honoring the spirit within you, however you want to see that, whether you are following Santeria or a West African religion or not. It can really be for anyone. And I didn't get that opportunity in the dance department, and it's something that I've been wanting to do. And so the fact that I was able to to just present it at Arts Initiative and say, hey, this is what I'd like to do for my workshop. And I was given resources. They bought skirts for everyone. The skirt, the falda, for those that don't know, was a big part of the movement within Bomba. my desk. Why are we buying these skirts? But it's so instrumental to the dance form. And so just to have the resources and support to teach something like that at U of M has been really wonderful. And then in consideration of my project, it's been great to, as Leah was mentioning, work on a project that I may not have created during my graduate studies. I had a very kind of specific line of research that I was working on. And not that it's completely unrelated, but it's certainly not following as strictly that line of research as my thesis was. But also to still be at U of M and have the resources, the connections. Again, I'm working with Maddie Levy and, you know, just to have people that are right here in the community. It's so easy to act access, different folks, different even just places to be at the university and within Ann Arbor at large because Ann Arbor just has a plethora of opportunities and resources for folks. It's just been nice to have this transition period to think about how I want to continue the research that I was doing in grad school to pull in other areas of interest that are emerging with this work, but then also to have the professional development workshops that we have every month to think about myself as an artist, as a business person going out into the world and using my art to hopefully make money, but also to reach other corners of the state, the country, the world, and not just within this U of M bubble. So it's been great to have this transition period.

[00:07:27.884] Mark Clague:
Yeah, and we know from survey research with our graduates how important those first two or three years are right after graduation.

[00:07:35.471] Mark Clague:
that if you can stay in the game as an artist in those couple years, that there's a high likelihood that you will find that sustainable living in the arts. But if you have to go immediately to paying the bills and worrying about the rent and all that, which is just life, right? That sometimes that can take artists off the path, right? And take them into a totally different field and they lose connection with their practice. So that's part of the strategy here is to really support you immediately after graduation. So to be eligible for the fellowship you have to graduate with in just the last two years right so that's part of it is to to be here for you at that critical moment so Zara tell

[00:08:16.916] sara faraj:
yeah so I think I resonate with a lot of what um Karen Leah shared and um even just what you shared Mark about how sometimes I think when you don't have that time or space you lose sight of what the creative practice means to you and what your vision is and so you know I um traditionally actually was a photojournalist and photographer and freelance photographer did weddings and things in Chicago and um through that lens saw you know working even in Flint seeing the Flint water crisis still being a very active thing and um getting to ask the questions who gets to decide this who plans this who how do we get here essentially with the you know environmental and social ills that we see and so I went into the field of urban planning I came to learn wow urban planners have a lot of power in shaping our social landscapes and our physical landscapes. And in my master's program of urban and regional planning, I feel that I did lose sight a little bit of my creative practice, right? There's so much reading and writing and scholarship around the actual practice of urban planning, which does have nodes of creativity in it. But that's why I think also finding photo voice as a practice was such a balm for me to understand that actually this methodology and through photography, urban planners and others are engaging with community members to better understand what their needs are. And so this time for me has been really recentering, I think, around that and also given me the space to sort of not only, as Karen Lee shared, practice through local workshops, aspects of photo voice, photo voice, cyanotype printmaking, things that bring me back to my roots and film photography and things of that nature and getting to share that excitement with others has been really powerful and exciting and really just having the time I mean even to create my own work and get to network and to show some of my work as well in a couple gallery settings local shows and to collaborate with people and build some potential future collaborations and then also to sticking with my urban planning roots of reading plethora about this and researching and really just as I mentioned getting to know I hope to do this work in a consulting capacity with my business planning participate planning participation following this and um really having those materials to be able to do that having all the aspects of the project and my ducks in a row for that I think um to hopefully garner some work in the future it's been this this time has provided me the space to do that and then hopefully to you know share those works with others so I am not the person potentially facilitating it's the folks on the ground that um are able to do this work as well all over. So yeah, it's been, I've never, I think I said off air that just I've never had an experience like this and truly having that time has been invaluable.

[00:11:18.530] Mark Clague:
So yeah, it's so great to see, I mean, Taubman is such an interesting place because when I think of an architect, you know, my art history classes had the Parthenon and famous architecture, all the cathedrals you had to go through, right? So it's easy for me to think of an architect as an artist. So it's really cool that you're bringing artists Yes. Totally awesome. So for all three of you, sort of like say all the dreams come true and you can write your ticket for what the next chapter is. What is that vision for what you would like to do as an artist, say in three, four or five years? And then maybe what's the next immediate step you're going to take to get there?

[00:11:58.052] Leah Crosby:
Well, I have a craft aspirations bingo board for the year. So that's kind of where my brain is at. right now in terms of long term thinking I am excited about thinking about ways to take the audio project that I'm doing this year and get featured on other people's podcasts and to think more about like ways to share that work on the internet with various communities that feels sort of like most immediate and most at hand I I'm very disciplined and I'm really good at living an artist's life. I keep very regular studio hours. They're extremely organized. I have checkpoints with myself. I don't need accountability buddies. I'm like very self-accountable. And I also am learning about myself, how important it's been for me to have the salary and the healthcare and that I don't see a life where I'm going to feel okay with continuing to do freelance art projects occasionally getting paid and not have that stability and so I think one of the original questions that hasn't been asked word for word but is sort of this idea of professionally I want to work in community programs I feel excited about partnering with a university museum or an independent museum or a small non-profit I really love doing community programming work uh prior to grad school i was in community arts education for years and years and years and years um and i'm excited about transitioning into a little bit more of a administrative role for that a little bit more of a planning and facilitating um capacity and i do think that they're i mean i've been kind of like strategic and like things that i've done this year to build my resume in that sort of a way um and i think there's always this question of do you have a full-time career in like arts administration and then your creative practice suffers but like you're invested in like living an artistic life or do you work um you know care has been in food service forever i also have done like a lot of bartending and also i'm i'm a licensed massage therapist so it's like okay do i have like a massage career and then have like more time with my art but then i'm like tired from so it's it's always this it's always a sort of question of like how much and and for me my my goal moving forward is to have uh stability through a career that uses multiple parts of my brain and engages me with community and my philosophies of the importance of art making um and that also I'm able to write into my contract somehow that I do one artist residency a year where for two to four weeks I can completely clock out and be really focused on art making um and I also know this about myself is that like the art making happens no matter what um there has never been a time where I have not made art I've tried to take breaks and it doesn't work um so I feel I feel totally confident that I will continue to live an artistic life um And it's just been such a gift to be able to do that full time for this year. And I'm under no, I do not believe that that will necessarily ever happen again. But I will, you know, try my darndest to keep applying for things 
[00:15:19.447] Mark Clague:
I hope it will. And it sounds like you have that commitment to making art happen no matter what. It reminds me, so part of my research as a historian actually has been on arts careers. And I think a lot of times when we tell history, we leave the people out of like the people-ness of it. the humanness of being a people, like the fact that they have to rent, pay rent and eat. But one of those concepts that your story hits on is the notion of the portfolio career, right? That you're doing many different things in a portfolio of activities and each one of those generates a certain amount of income. And that's a great vision, but the criticism of that, right? It's a kind of neoliberalist fantasy that it's exhausting to do all that and to basically be making a marginal living at 12 different things, working twice as hard as people who have sort of a salary job and have that privilege. But one of the things I've argued for is this notion of what I call the platform career, which is a little bit what you're saying, which is you take one of those activities and you turn it into enough of a living that you get that stability and those benefits, and that that should be part of the goal. And then on top of that platform, you build the opportunities for more and more artistic practice. And hopefully that platform is also creative and tied to your practice, right? So I could see for instance, in your case, there being museums and libraries and places that are institutions that have had a very traditional, very passive role, right? Where people just come in and look at stuff or pick up a book and go away. And they're starting to change and see themselves as places of interactivity. And I could see them needing a person like you who can make stuff happen with the community. I mean, really with all of you.

[00:16:54.970] Kara Roseborough:
I hope- Tell the world, tell the world.

[00:16:56.692] Mark Clague:
world right now. Leah, we're doing it. All right, Kara, how about you?

[00:17:01.177] Kara Roseborough:
Oh boy, the three to five year plan. No, I would love to use this project and everything that I learned in grad school to help me launch a ballet company. I think Detroit's a great place to do it, not just for the personal reasons. It kind of feels like a homecoming, even though I'm not from here. But just the fact that Michigan has so many wonderful artists, dancers that have either graduated from the program or land here for some reason, and the only major bad company that's here, which is a great one, is Grand Rapids Ballet, which is two hours away. And you have a whole community of people that love the arts, that love dance, that flock to the Detroit Opera House to go see Alvin Ailey and Dance Theater of Harlem and Complexions, and they don't have a ballet company of their own. And so I call it a ballet desert. I feel like there's a need. And I would love to start a project-based company first and then move into a more full time company but also like Leah I entered grad school in part because I was working five different jobs including bartending and I was like this has been a really cute time in my 20s and I'm done now and so I would like to continue to have some stability and I love doing that with teaching so in addition to being a part of the creative careers residency I have been able to teach a couple of classes for the dance department and that's been really great and I would love to continue teaching not as my full-time job, as it is not my full-time job right now, but to continue to supplement what I'm doing and also to just continue to inform me as a creative. I feel like I became a better dancer, a better artist once I started teaching because I had to articulate things to students and go, I don't really know how I've been doing this. Let's talk about it. Let's learn together. And so there's a lot of reciprocity within the classroom that I feel like selfishly has greatly informed how I move throughout the world as an artist. So teaching, I see myself continuing to do that, but continuing to work on creating my own company that requires a lot of grant writing. I do love writing. I have my undergrad in English, so I'm going to put that sheet of paper to use. And in the meantime, also continuing to freelance choreograph. I've been in talks with different companies, organizations, including folks in Detroit and also elsewhere about going and setting pieces, creating pieces. And that's something I really love. Dance has been a way for me to travel throughout the

[00:19:38.384] Mark Clague:
as long as I can. Somehow being a teacher is to be less than or, you know, you failed at something, but it's not that it's not that case at all. So, Sarah, tell us about your plans and hopes 


[00:20:14.824] sara faraj:
Yes. So my vision for the future with my career and this work and this project is to continue to do hold space for photo voice, for getting cameras into the hands of folks and to continue to step into the intersection of of art and urban planning and organizing and so I think you know I consider myself to be a non-traditional not only student but also artist in the sense that I do believe that art really holds power and there are spaces that could benefit from it and I think urban planning is one of them and engaging with folks I think so you know even just thinking back to my internship with the Kresge Foundation that photo voice and these emancipatory praxis methods can be implemented to better ensure capital absorption of funding, for example. So folks often want to understand in urban planning, are these dollars working? And so I see these methods as a way to better understand the voices and to check in on the ground. And I sort of see these tools as a way, hopefully, either in a consulting capacity or working with a philanthropic or other organization, maybe even governments to implement tools like this to then produce and gather data apart local researchers produce data through photographs and then to sort of ship that message back up to the folks who are sending dollars out and want to address these larger issues so you know through either my business that I'm cultivating planning participation or working with folks in southeast Michigan I'm specifically interested in the Dearborn Detroit community and the issues of of folks who experienced the most marginalization, immigrants, refugees, to really better understand their experiences so we can provide better social services. And I think another thing too through PhotoVoice is just to hopefully get some grant dollars and funding to continue that work, to continue to purchase cameras. I think in my experience of understanding the power of photography and how it led me to urban planning and to ask these questions about who gets to decide and why do they decide, I think if we can do that also for youth members, we can cultivate a new generation of leaders that might also feel inspired and better understand at an earlier age that their vision and their voice does matter. It's very important and that we can share those messages to educate each other and to learn more about other experiences and to hopefully disarm assumptions and excuse me bias about other people based on where they come or what they look like so yeah I hope you know in five years stay tuned if you want to participate in a project hopefully I'll be there to help

[00:23:17.739] Mark Clague:
that's great and this whole issue of immigration is so much a part of the history of the world and history of the United States and something that's only going to become more of an urgent issue in the near future I'm sure so well thank you for an amazing conversation thank you for the work you're doing I'm really proud and of the work you're doing and excited that the Arts Initiative has been able to support your work and really looking forward to those dreams coming true. I hope that we continue to support young artists like you and our recent Wolverine graduates to making a difference in the world. So thanks so much.

[00:24:02.049] Mark Clague:
Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan Arts Initiative. Please subscribe to hear more great conversations with artists, scholars, and arts leaders from across the campus and across the globe. Send your comments and suggestions via email to creative currents at umich.edu. This episode of Creative Currents was produced by Mark Clague and Jessica Jenks, and our audio engineer is Audrey Banks. Our original theme music is composed and performed by Ansel Neely, a student at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance. To learn more about the University of Michigan's Arts initiative, please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening.