Conversations with a Creator

Stephanie A. Wynn has written three books all from lived experience, all to give someone else the game she didn't have. A Crohn's disease diagnosis after years of unexplained illness and heartbreak turned a business hustle into a purpose-driven mission. Her third book Navigating IBD is a six-week blueprint for patients and caregivers navigating inflammatory bowel disease and instead of going on Am...

Evan Whitehead became the youngest assistant superintendent in Illinois at 34 and spent the next several years proving it 10-to-12-hour days, unused PTO stacking up, no vacations, no pauses. Until everything shut down. In partial hospitalization, three words kept surfacing in every therapy session: balance, boundaries, breaks. He said them out loud, ended up facilitating half the program, and walk...

Dylan Mixer has been drumming since he was five, discovered film composing was a real job when he noticed Thomas Newman's name on two very different movies, and has since scored feature documentaries, action films, built his own sample instruments, and started a synth pop project during COVID that took on a life of its own. He joins J. Ack and Shadcore for a wide-ranging conversation about the fil...

Jaire Harrell started filming church services with a tripod and no idea it would become a career. Now he's the founder of Harrell Family Creative, a filmmaker whose work spans Christian music videos, a Pinellas County Schools commission, a Jamaican Patois short film, and a live album project for a nine-instrument worship leader. He also happens to be Shadcore's son which makes this conversation so...

Alessandra Levy is a lifelong musician but six months ago she made her first beat on a borrowed MPC 60 ii and posted it anonymously at 12:30am so her musician friends couldn't find it. 35,000 followers later, she's collaborating with Pocket Queen, talking to J. Ack and Shadcore, and planning a beat tape with zero sample clearances needed because every sound will be hers. This conversation covers h...

Ray Billingsley has been drawing on a deadline since he was 12 years old. Curtis , the strip he dreamed up literally overnight in a rough Harlem apartment, has run in over 250 newspapers for more than 30 years, and in 2022, Ray became the first Black cartoonist to win the Reuben Award. J. Ack and Shadcore sit down with the legend for an hour-plus conversation covering everything from industry gate...

J. Ack and Shadcore built Conversations with a Creator for one reason to give creative people a platform to say something real. This trailer pulls from some of the most honest moments in the show: burnout that became a breakdown, music that pulled someone back from the edge, a woman learning to reparent herself, and the reminder that your best work doesn't require perfection. It just requires you...