Déja Denise is an actor-producer-spoken word artist-model-content creator. She does it all, really. I was lucky enough to meet Déja in a course we both took at NYU called “Self-Start: Artistic Entrepreneurship” (which coincidentally is also where Shesources was born). It’s only fitting that Déja is the first person interviewed for Shesources.

Déja is set to graduate from NYU next year having studied both acting and the business of the entertainment industry. What you might not know is that she’s set to produce two feature-length films already too. I know what you’re thinking. Wait what? She must be…remarkable! She is. Often the most inspiring people in your life that you look up to are your peers. Mentorship and role modeling and aspirations really have nothing to do with age. Déja Denise is certainly someone that I and many others look up to.

I had the pleasure of calling Déja over video and learning about her journey, why she wants to produce, and what it means to her to be a Black woman in the entertainment industry.

Note: at the end of the interview all of the ways to follow and support Déja Denise online are linked.

How would you identify yourself as an artist?

I identify as a multi-hyphenate creative! Actress & producer first, as well as a spoken word artist, model, and content creator!

What made you want to be a producer?

I started producing when I was back in high school after forming my spoken word performing group. There was a need in my community to produce stories that were unique to us, and my whole goal is to provide a platform that gives voices to the voiceless, that allows people to tell their stories, and to discover the nuances of the Black communities. My first start in producing was when I didn’t even know I was producing. It was at the “Arts in the Hearts Festival” in my city. I used the opportunity to cast, direct, and assistant-write a showcase for my spoken word group that was called “Spoken Too Soon?” Then I did it again the next year, and the year after until I graduated.

Then I came to NYU, and my freshman year I told my friend, now one of my best friends, that I would produce a script he wrote. I took a Business of Producing Class, and then I got into the Bryce Dallas Howard Filmmaking Lab: The Nine Muses Lab. This was my first REAL opportunity to produce. And my love for it grew then. It was just all me wanting to give underrepresented voices dimension to their stories. I just wanted to let people know that the stories we see about Black people are stereotypical and tired. That there is so, so much more to us than that.

For those who don’t know (including myself) what is the step-by-step process for you when you decide to produce something?

Well, being in Bryce’s class was my first real life experience film producing, so I don’t have an established process, you know? It was really a matter of figuring it all out as I went along. We didn’t really have a guideline or a guidebook. It was more like here’s $500 and a ton of really strong development, now make your thing HAPPEN. And that’s when I finally got the chance to produce my friend Sam’s short film, White Mirror , like I promised him I would, while also producing my own short film, Home is Where Your Art Lives.

So first, you have to have a script, of course, and it needs to be good because it’ll save you so much time in the long run when you get into production and post-production. Everything after that was just me trusting and following my instincts, literally, that’s all I could do! I’m like okay, what needs to happen to make this script into a film? Well I need a director, someone who will have a creative vision for the film and then I need someone to shoot it, the person who will make all the of vision into a concrete visual. Then I’m like alright, cool, bet. I’ve got a team, what do I do with them? I start to plan with them, and ask—what are the essentials that each department of this film will need in order to get their work done? Oh yeah yeah, I definitely lock down a budget before I do anything else actually (and in normal settings, you actually would get all of your licensing, insurance, contracts, and paperwork taken care of first as well, I’m learning that on my first feature film that I’m working on this summer).

Next up I secure my locations!! And on the film that I worked on for Sam…that was a doosie. I was lucky enough that my internship was near the bodega we wanted to film in, and we took turns going up there every day for almost three weeks negotiating with the owner to allow us to film there. Until I was just kind of like, you know what, how about I buy all of my crew’s meals and snacks here, if you allow us to film? Eventually we wrote up a contract and FINALLY got them on board. Really I killed two birds in one stone in terms of catering for that day and the location. Ugh, what an accomplishment that moment was!! Locking down locations always feels great I must say.

But, in reality my next step is securing catering, and handling any and all other logistical things before I bring the actors in. I was like oh yeah, I need people to actually play these parts! So, I went to Breakdown Express (which is the back end of Actor’s Access), it was so, so helpful. I highly recommend! We went between that and Facebook (although we could have just solely used that). Awesome we got actors! Then we send out production schedules, have final production meetings, take care of equipment (and this was something else I learned on my own about NYU having CSI, College Student Insurance, and also a general liability coverage for us that’s in our tuition. I was just kind of like what? We pay for this??), wardrobe, rehearsals, any and everything else to help you feel like you are OVER-prepared for filming (usually there is a pre-production producer, and then a unit-production manager on set, but in this case we did not have that). And once your call sheets go out, it gets exciting because all of your hard work starts to show itself.

Usually when you’ve done all your planning, your Assistant Director (AD) takes over and the set will hopefully run itself. Being that it was my first time, I didn’t have that experience at all. I was actually the Assistant Director for White Mirror as well and the producer on set for my film Home is Where Your Art Lives while I was in it.

Once you finish production: THAT’S A WRAP. Then you move on to post with your editor, sound mixers, composers, colorists, and everything. Then on to marketing and distribution which hopefully you’ve already figured out in pre-production what that might look like for your particular film. For my two, it was really just a matter of submitting to film festivals.

That was a little all over the place, but this was just all stuff that I was figuring out as I went. Either it was just that I knew what needed to come next, or I’d research and Google became my best friend, or I’d ask. But, it was really a journey, and now I’m embarking on a new one with this feature because I’m sure this process will be similar but also very different. Also—every film is different, and unique in its needs, so your process will not be the same every time.

So…you’re producing your first feature film?? Let’s talk about that. How did you get here?

Oh my gosh. Okay. I’m so grateful for my friend who I studied with at Tisch in the same primary studio (Meisner). She was also in this Bryce Dallas Howard class with me, and I helped her with her project in that class. She did a documentary, it’s great. She’s an incredible person. Her name is Lily Mannon and the writer for the feature film we’re working on is an alumni from the Meisner Studio as well and she had this script and she was like I don’t know what I’m doing in terms of producing this, like I don’t even know where to start. And I guess she was talking to Lily about it and Lily said hey, I know someone who can help you and she mentioned me and then we had an interview process and I ended up being hired for the job! And I was like oh my gosh. This is my first feature film. That’s wild. That’s crazy. And at the time I didn’t really realize it. I was just like oh my gosh! Yes! I would love to produce this project, also because the writer is another Black woman, which is even more of an incentive for me. So I was like yes, of course. These are the stories that I want to tell, that’s why I became a producer in the first place. To tell stories for underrepresented people.

That’s amazing! What’s the film about?

So the film is called Unbloomed. It’s a story about two women of color who are... I would say sexually unbloomed. They haven’t really had much sexual experience and they’re best friends and they just graduated from college. So they decide to use each other as a tool for sexual exploration. And for one of the women it works perfectly, she figures out everything she likes and what she doesn’t like and she ends up moving on and gets into a really healthy, great relationship. The other woman gets left behind because she got sucked into the connection between them and the agreement they had. She liked it. So it’s really a story about growth. It’s a self-journey or self-discovery type of story and it really dives into what it’s like to not be in love with someone. It’s about what it’s like to be so comfortable in a situation that you don’t want to take the risk to leave it. I’m really, really excited about it.

And there’s another feature film on the way too?

The short film that I produced with my friend Sam (professionally known as Samuel-Taylor), we’ve been using the proof of concept that we made in Bryce’s class to pitch it for grants and we’re actually going to be making that into a feature film too. So right now I’m working on my first two feature films!

Image courtesy of Déja Denise. — *Image courtesy of Déja Denise.*

That is incredible…so deserving and so so exciting. What kind of stories do you wish we saw more of?

So, I think there are so many nuances to this for me. I am a Black artist and I think the way that Black people are represented in the media and film industry is out of balance. There are particular ways that we are always represented in the industry whether its the actors themselves, for example in terms of the people our age, you have your Zendaya’s you have your Yara Shahidi’s you have your light skinned actresses being seen all the time. Then, if we break out of our realm of POC writers, Black artists are placed into the realm of white writers and white directors where we’re playing either the funny best friend or you know, we’re stuck in the same continuous roles with the same narratives and the same stories while there are so many nuances being missed.

In my spoken word visual film, for instance, it paints the picture of me. I’m from a very urban, Black community and those stories don’t really get told unless it’s about gang violence. I think one thing that has really pushed the boundaries with those stories is Moonlight because it’s centered a lot around urban Black communities, but also tells the story of two Black men who are figuring out their sexuality and that's a story that doesn’t get told about the Black community often. For my spoken word visual film, I told the story about how Black artists don’t get supported in the Black community because a lot of times artistry is associated with homosexuality and in the Black community there is a lot of homophobia and transphobia…yeah, a lot of different phobias around sexuality and gender fluidity. And another reason is that religion in the Black community is super important because I feel like that’s the only thing, a lot of times, that we attach ourselves to: to ground us, to give us an anchor of faith, to give us an anchor of hope, to give us an anchor belief. Having that religion is the backbone of the Black community and because of that, artistry is hard to put into the narrative because it’s like oh, you’re not using your god-given gifts to further the religion or to further the gospel. And I just feel like there’s so much more to our community than that.

My friend group back home...sometimes they don’t understand what being an actor is or being a producer is, and they’re like “why are you doing that? We have to work twice as hard already to even get into the same room as the majority of white people a lot of the time. Why would you want to be in a career that pushes you a couple steps back and makes sure you have to work even harder?” and I’m just like: That’s another thing that I want to tackle. That’s another conversation I want to have. So the whole purpose of my short film was: why don’t you support me? What is the purpose of you not supporting your fellow Black artists? We need to start supporting each other in all realms, including the realm of Black artistry that doesn’t include being a rapper or being a singer. It’s so much more than that.

I want to see the nuances of Black culture and the nuances of the Black community because there’s so many of them and I feel like the way in which we are portrayed is very one-dimensional. But that’s just where I want to start, that’s my starting point right now.

I want to produce stories that particularly help the lower income communities. I think there’s a lot of light that needs to be shined there. I think another film that does that really beautifully is The Florida Project. It’s not centered around people of color, it’s actually white leads, but it's about lower-income people and what their lives look like and how children look growing up in those situations and it sheds light on that, which I also feel like are stories that aren't told very often.

I can’t wait to watch those stories, because I know you’ll produce them as soon as you can. So if you feel comfortable speaking about it, I want to go back to where you said you have to work twice as hard, ten times as harder to get into the rooms your white counterparts are in. Has there ever been an instance where you felt belittled by someone, someone made you feel lesser-than, and how did you deal with that?

I’m going to start with the how-I-deal-with-that part because I’ve learned just like, man, this summer... in terms of educating other people as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement resurfacing… I’ve learned so much about myself and I’ve realized that it has become part of my being you know? My existence is working twice as hard. That’s how I move. That’s how I always move. My ambition, my drive, my determination, my vision, all of that has come from the fact that I see where my people come from and I see how we’re treated. I see the lesser privilege. I see all of that. I live in that. That’s where I grew up.

So when I go to places like NYU, and there’s just so many privileged people and people don’t recognize that they are privileged people, I see it. People were, I don’t want to say intimidated, but people didn’t know how to respond to me. They didn’t know how to handle me, they didn’t know how to interact with me. They didn’t know and I could see it and because of that I didn’t know how to interact with anyone else either. I could see by the way people acted around me, or whether or not I got invited to the parties or invited to collaborate in certain spaces or anything like that and I ended up going through a huge, huge shift in terms of trying not to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy and having to work much, much harder to figure out how to be myself in spaces that weren’t created for me.

And gosh, man, I just remember freshman year I felt so lonely because I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone. Because I felt like when I would, people didn’t know how to take my story. They didn’t know how to relate to my struggles. They just didn’t know how to and a lot of times they wouldn’t try. Because it would take too much effort, and then I’m just like, I don’t blame you it’s fine. It is what it is. Now...I’m like— I really wish people would have taken the time to get to know me and that way, rather than just writing me off as just what they see, they would know me. And that’s just been an all-my-life type of thing.

When I was in high school, I went to a performing arts high school, my friends were all predominantly Black but a lot of them had a better time assimilating into white friend groups and collaborating with white people. I had a harder time doing that because again, my background just didn’t know how to mix and blend with them. They didn’t know how to interact with me. So I was never let into those rooms or their spaces and that’s another reason why I started to create my own spaces, because I wasn’t let into those spaces in the way I deserved to be as an artist. I turned to poetry and spoken word. It was also a way for me to create space for other Black people who weren’t allowed into those spaces. And now looking back at it, I see the group I made and had were all people who the majority of our white counterparts considered to be loud, to be ghetto, to be not worthy of their time or considered aggressive or sassy or whatever. Those were the people who were in my group because they felt like the majority wouldn’t let them in and I don’t think that’s fair.

The way that Black people are presented in the media specifically, I don’t think it’s fair. There’s more to us. Even in the way that I’m talking to you right now in a very professional type of manner...there’s that part of me and there’s also the loud, fun, silly, goofy, love-to-party type part of me. I feel like there are just so many nuances that aren’t being received and it’s frustrating.

I remember coming into NYU, I was so guarded because I didn’t want anyone to perceive me a certain way. So I always put up walls in that space for people to like me, for me to be softer and friendlier and more inviting and all of this stuff instead of just being myself. So there was that, and there was having to work twice as hard in studio. I would be told: you’re not soft enough, you’re not being vulnerable, you’re not doing this you’re not doing that and I’m like: have you ever stopped to think that we can’t all be taught the same way? Everybody’s from different backgrounds. Everybody can’t be taught the same. Everybody has different struggles. Everybody’s mental capacities, the way we move through space, our existence, they are not the same.

Who and what inspires you?

Well, let me start here: I have 10 siblings and I’m the oldest out of 10. So knowing that their beady little eyes are on me definitely inspires me a lot. Every time I come home, the amount of time I get to spend with my sisters and see how much they’re growing really keeps me going and then, I hate to keep bringing this up, but just knowing where I come from and what’s expected of them. I want them to be able to see that they can achieve so much more than what’s expected of them. I think that’s my biggest inspiration.

I think proving something to myself keeps me going a lot of times. It’s just like, alright. I don’t need to prove anything to anybody else, just myself.

And also other people that I see whose stories resonate with me that make me think: oh yeah, those are the same thoughts I had growing up. I remember being in that place. I remember feeling that low. I know that I wished I had someone to look up to and I know that if they don’t have anyone else I want to be the person they can look up to.

What are your aspirations and dreams for your career?

First things first, as always, I want to be able to have a sustainable life from being an actor and be able to fully support my life off of just being an actor. That’s what I want the main chunk of my income to be from. It’s just what I love doing and to be able to do that for the rest of my life and not have to worry about anything else is my goal. But you know, in addition to that I’d love to have multiple streams of income, that’s an aspiration for me too.

One of my biggest aspirations is to create these artistic resource centers, both domestically and internationally, and put them in low-income communities and have them be specifically for kids who want to be artists, but don’t have the resources to do that. So whether it’s providing scholarships and grants for applying to art schools (because we all know those applications are expensive) or having headshot photographers available, having dance studios, recording studios available, having places to print out sheet music...places that are resource centers for people who don’t have the extra funds. Even the extra $10. The little things, like printing and dance shoes or dance clothes. I want it to be both a resource and production center too.

That sounds amazing, honestly. One more thing, what brings you joy?

I found this out the other day. Just seeing the people around me win and succeed. Oh my gosh, when I see that my friend is booking jobs, or recently how my 12 year old sister started a home jewelry business, and being able to have the funds to invest in that. My other two friends just started glassmaking, which is such an insane, niche thing. My other friend is making ceramics and they both just started their business together and again, having the funds to invest in them and buy their products. My other friend just landed this really cool series and my other friend just dropped an EP and it’s getting such big attention.

Yeah, being able to see the people around me winning, it brings my heart such joy to the core. I’m the person who loves helping people and seeing the people I care about the most happy just makes me feel like I’m floating on cloud nine.

I have a few fun speed round questions to wrap it up! What’s the last thing you watched on your screen?

Oh my gosh. Yesterday. I literally watched it last night. Oh my gosh. I cannot remember. I’m just gonna say Once Upon a Time.

No wait, it was Tiny House Nation!!

(Déja and I then had a freak out about Tiny Houses because we realized we both LOVE Tiny Houses)

What’s the last book you read, or what’s your favorite ?

Alright….my favorite books are A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. The entire series is 13 books, and I’ve read the entire series at least three times.

What has been the best part about quarantining during COVID-19 for you?

Getting back in touch with myself. When everything was moving so quickly all the time, I couldn’t hear myself think. So getting back in touch with myself has been really positive. And growing in my relationship with my boyfriend has been really positive too.

What has been the worst part of quarantine for you?

Okay so I know I just said getting back in touch with myself was the best part but also, sitting with my own thoughts has also been the worst part. I think I’ve learned how much of an extrovert I am, so not being able to see people and my friends has been the worst part.

If you could tell a younger version of yourself one thing, what would it be?

It would be keep going and know that you are worth so much more than you think you are. I think that’s it.

Women don’t share their stories enough. So thank you Déja for sharing yours. That’s a wrap!

Follow Déja Denise on Instagram here, subscribe to her YouTube channel here, find her on Facebook here, and check out her website: www.dejadgreen.com

Image by David Brown (@artbydavidb) — *Image by David Brown (@artbydavidb*)

Déja Denise