The Charlotte is Creative Podcast

For this special 100th episode of the Charlotte is Creative Podcast, Matt and Tim sit down with Charlotte fashion designer Will White.

Recorded immediately following Creative Mornings at the NASCAR Hall of Fame on October 6, 2023, Matt and Tim sit down with CT Anderson from SpringClean.org, about the theme of Endurance.

Recorded immediately following Creative Mornings Charlotte on June 2, 2023, Matt and Time talk with Tony Award Winner Corey Mitchell, founder of Charlotte's Theater Gap Initiative.

Fresh from his emotional presentation at the May 5 Creative Mornings event, Quadriphonic Sound's David Jeffers joins Matt and Tim to talk about his path to sound design, just what a sound designer does, and the music that inspires him.

Lauren Widrick, fresh off her inspirational talk at the April Creative Mornings event, talks with Matt and Tim about walking away from a perfectly good job to chase a dream.

"A national treasure." -Wynton Marsalis "The best musician on the planet." -Vince Gill "A supreme master at what he does." -Yo-Yo Ma "He is to music what Muhammad Ali is to boxing." -James Taylor Imagine how good Mark O'Connor must be if these are the words his peers have said about him. Mark's musical DNA includes American folk tradition as well as classical music, and even jazz -- which makes se...

Charlotte is Creative's Matt Olin sits doen with Charlotte Poet Laureate Jay Ward, to learn more about how one becomes a Poet Laureate, and why he hid his talent for many years.

At our first CreativeMornings/Charlotte event of 2023, we met three people committed to helping others find their Sanctuary: Liliana Jaramillo (Mexico), Yeferline Gomez (Dominican Republic), and Sadaf Alemi (Afghanistan). They all work at ourBRIDGE for Kids, a local nonprofit whose mission is to foster the education, acculturation, and resilience of newly arrived and first generation children and...

Mattie Marshall is a Charlottean. Like so many in Charlotte, she wasn’t born here. But, she’s made it her home.  While she’s lived in several neighborhoods since moving here, it’s the historic Washington Heights community - one of Charlotte’s original Black suburbs, named after Booker T. Washington. For more than 30 years, Ms. Marshall has been the president of the Historic Washington Heights Neig...

Tommie Robinson is an artist. He’s been among our most celebrated in Charlotte, NC for some time. But it wasn’t always that way. As a black man who wanted to paint for a living in post-World War II South, there wasn’t a road map for him. But, he had talent. He had passion. And – as he says – he had a hard head. So he succeeded and still paints today. Welcome to this episode of “The World Should Kn...

Rudean Harris didn’t learn how to smile until she was a teenager.  After the death of Rudean’s mother, her father moved she and her siblings to Charlotte where, her extended family could help raise them. Fighting through poverty and bigotry, the family stayed together, but there was little to smile about. But, through the kindness of those in her community, Ms. Harris learned to smile. She opened...

Ricky Singh is an educator, artist and father of four, so he knows what it takes to help build individuals and communities. He put much of that knowledge and passion to work this summer after the Black Lives Matter protests, painting several murals on and around Beatties Ford Road.  On today's Who Built Me segment, producer Andy Goh talks to Ricky about about the people he credits for building him...

Whether you know it or not, Josh Jacobson of Next Stage and his work have likely touched your life. Josh and his team work with many of the most impactful non-profit organizations in Charlotte, and he continues to be one of the most sought-after voices in the community. In today's episode of Creative Mornings Rewind, Tim Miner sits down with Josh to talk about his career, which began in New York C...

"The vision is a community arts hub - visual, performing arts, hyper-local ... we anticipate that this 4237 community arts hub will be that now and for at least the next 15, 20, 30 years and maybe forever ..." - Tony Kuhn, Flywheel Group, LLC Something interesting is taking place off E. Sugar Creek Rd. -- the creation of an arts cluster intended to be the foundation of a new development blending c...

Children's Theatre of Charlotte has long been revered by Charlotteans, but especially Head Biscuit Baker Matt Olin. Having spent much of his creative formative years working with CTC, Matt credits them for having made a profound impact on him and his creative work today.  Last month, CTC hired Nao Tsurumaki to fill the vacant Managing Director position. Nao comes to Charlotte after having spent ma...

At the February 2021 edition of Creative Mornings Charlotte, artist and Costa Rican native Irisol Gonzalez spoke about the global theme of promise. But what made her talk special was not the promises she was making to others, but the promises she made to herself. In immigrating to the US at just ten years old and without knowing a word of English, Irisol made a promise to herself that she would be...

One of Charlotte's most prolific creative forces is making a move. Boris "Bluz" Rogers has been a fixture in the local creative space for more than a decade as an independent performing artist. In 2021, he's moving into a new role with the heavily established Blumenthal Performing Arts. In today's episode of the Biscuit CLT Podcast, we debut a new segment called Onboarding, where we'll talk to Blu...

Lawrence Gordon is a man who has many skills, and applies them in several different arenas. By day, he's the VP of Workforce Development at Hope Haven, a Charlotte non-profit dedicated to helping those suffering from addiction. At night, he's also a basketball coach at Carmel Christian. Lawrence's work with his kids writing children's books, however, might be his greatest passion of them all. In t...

In today’s episode of The Biscuit, we’ve asked several Charlotte creatives to give us what they’ve learned from 2020 and what their hopes are for 2021. You’ll get to hear from creatives like Sonya Phiffer of Elder Gallery, photographer Ernesto Moreno and painter Rosalia Torres Weiner about their hopes for the new year. 2020 has been a year unlike any other. We hope there's been room for both learn...

In 2009, local freelance writer Jody Mace was faced with a question that she heard echoed around the city: What do we do in Charlotte that's fun and not incredibly expensive. That's when Jody and her husband decided to build the aptly-named website Charlotte on the Cheap, where they would list as many of the fun and exciting events that were happening around the city that cost less than your avera...

This week marks the fifth birthday of the Charlotte chapter of Creative Mornings (CM/CLT). What started as an effort to gather people together once a month to share, laugh, learn and celebrate Charlotte’s creative community has inspired many collaborations, as well as the development of the HUG micro-grant program, Queen City Quiz Show and Charlotte Is Creative, the nonprofit parent of The Biscuit...

Being on the frontlines of building a community take a relentless devotion to the work and unwavering commitment to the cause. Chef Ron Ahlert, Executive Director of Community Culinary School of Charlotte has been putting those values to work for more than two decades. Today, he's helping lead a kitchen program that's helping to get community workers back on their feet.  In today's episode of The...

In the latest episode in our Who Built Me series, we talk to the founder of Heal Charlotte, Greg Jackson. Jackson, whose organization is working to provide affordable housing for families of need, named Otis Crowder as someone he wanted to pay tribute to.  Jackson talks about meeting Crowder at a Rotary meeting where Jackson was speaking about Heal Charlotte, and them becoming friends quickly ther...

In a new series called Scratch Made, head biscuit bakers Tim Miner and Matt Olin sit down for a socially-distanced conversation on Tim's open air back patio. The two take turns answering each other's questions on five topics that are on their minds or happening in the Charlotte creative scene. Hear them talk about what they love and hate about Zoom meetings, the future of live events like Creative...

One of the city's most versatile entertainers sits down in today's episode of the Biscuit CLT podcast with host Tim Miner. For the past three years, Aaron Dodge has dominated Instagram and now TikTok feeds alike, but in 2020 he's jumping into the show full time. After working with renowned Charlotte video production team The Littlefield Company, Dodge is fulfilling a long-time vision of being a fu...