The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds

Art is World with Sarah Saturday

GARDENING, NOT ARCHITECTURE is the le nom de scène of SARAH SATURDAY, an innovative musician and multimedia performance artist based in Nashville. Over the past 15 years, Sarah has made a name for herself with her boundary-pushing artistic expression and collaborations, combining music, film, dance, spoken word, and visual art into immersive, interdisciplinary experiences. IG: @gardeningnotarchitecture

Art is Everything with Clay Steakley

Clay Steakley is a writer, filmmaker, musician, and theatre artist. He creates multidisciplinary works combining all of these because he got tired of choosing, and because it gives him the opportunity to play well with others.His work has been published alongside Aimee Bender’s and Lauren Groff’s in Slake, as well as in Cathexis Northwest Press, Fiction Fix, From the Depths, Waxing & Waning, and more. He was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship, and received the Ruby P. Treadway award for creative writing. He was a 2020/21 OZ Arts Art and The Porch Art Wire Fellow. He has been a professional copywriter and art director for more than 20 years. As an actor, he has worked with companies including Arena Stage, Round House Theatre, Theater J, Actors Bridge Ensemble, Theatre Dybbuk, and many other regional professional companies. His film and television work includes supporting roles in Walk the Line (20th Century Fox), The Wire (HBO), Deja Vu (Touchstone/Disney), White Lightnin’ (IFC/Vice), and Elvis (CBS miniseries). He trained with Steppenwolf West and earned his BA in theatre and English from Belmont University. He is a multi-instrumentalist and has performed with artists including Matthew Ryan, Kate York, and Strays Don’t Sleep, and has released two albums of his own, including the music for his work The Fire Cycle. The Fire Cycle is a multidisciplinary collection including a book of poetry, several films, instrumental music, theatre, and visual art. The films have screened at the Defy Film Festival in Nashville and the Cadence Poetry Film Festival in Seattle, and a stage work has been workshopped at OZ Arts. In June 2025, Clay and collaborators will premiere a new stage work. He has also received an artist-in-residence grant to support a film titled The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra, for television broadcast and streaming in 2026. Learn more at www.thefirecycle.com [http://www.thefirecycle.com/]

Art is Not Optional with Cameron L. Mitchell

Cameron L. Mitchell is an internationally acclaimed artist renowned for his transformative storytelling.  As a playwright, he has produced notable works such as “Blackbird,” a powerful one-man show exploring Black men's mental health, which Middle Tennessee State University, the Kindling Arts Festival, and the Shades of Black Festival have showcased. His work “Love Yourz,” a unique love story intertwining Rap and Poetry, also earned recognition at the Shades of Black Festival. Critics and audiences celebrate Cameron, an award-winning actor, for portraying Corey Maxson in the critically acclaimed Broadway play, “Fences" (Nashville Rep), which won the Best Contemporary Drama award. His other distinguished roles include Sunny and Brandon in the world premiere of “Ghost” at the Nashville Children’s Theatre, and Subject 1 in “Project Awake.” As a Tennessee-based teaching artist, Cameron has collaborated with prominent organizations such as Disney, PBS, Metro Arts, Oz Arts, the National Civil Rights Museum, the Jazz Museum in Harlem, 21c Chicago, the Stax Museum, The Bobby Bones Show, Vanderbilt University, Meharry Medical College, and many more. He has mentored youth for ten years through organizations like Southern Word, Nashville Children's Theater, Nashville Public Television, and Oz Arts. Through his spoken word poetry, Cameron raises awareness about mental health and ignites important conversations, performing and conducting creative writing workshops across the globe, including in Japan, Tanzania, and Germany. Murfreesboro, Tennessee, honored him as the 2021 Actor Laureate and the 2022 Poet Laureate. Cameron is also the founder of Free Fyre, a 501(c)(3) arts organization committed to arts advocacy and community engagement. Through this organization, he has served thousands worldwide.  https://www.freefyre.org/ [https://www.freefyre.org/] https://www.instagram.com/camspeaks1/ [https://www.instagram.com/camspeaks1/]

Art is Borderless with Fjolla Hoxha

Fjolla Hoxha is a writer, theater & drama critic, and performance maker from Prizren, Kosova, based in Nashville, TN. In addition to her home country, she has studied, worked, and lived in Istanbul, Turkey, and Helsinki, Finland.  She holds an MA in Live Art and Performance Studies from the Theater Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Her artistic practice is based on research rooted in cultural studies, oral histories, and narratives, as well as institutional and personal archives. Aside from being a writer, Fjolla works as a cross-media performance artist, focused on site-specificity and audience participation. She has collaborated with various artists, collectives, and institutions based in Europe and the U.S. and her work has been staged and stage-read in Kosova, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, and the UK.  Her US debut was at Nashville’s 2024 Kindling Arts Festival. She also published her plays and reviews in Greece, New York, and the Nashville-based Music City Review. You can find Fjolla at: fjollahoxha.com [http://fjollahoxha.com/]

Art is Life with Nina Adel

In this episode, we talk about Art with Nina Adel, an interdisciplinary artist, musician, craftsperson,  speaker of languages, English professor, facilitator of the Nashville-based Immigrants Write Workshop, and recipient of a 2023 Yaddo artist residency. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and an MA in English and Writing from Belmont University. Nina is a winner of the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2020 Buckvar Prize for her lyric essay Refugere. Nina’s most recent work has been published in Porter House Review, Maryland Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Breath and Shadow, Shark Reef, Tomahawk Creek Review, and many other publications. She has received recognition in such diverse corners of the arts world as Glimmer Train, The Kerrville Music Festival, and Wolf Trap, among others. October 2024 brought the release of her poetry chapbook Sugar Crash. She lives in Nashville with her family. Nina is an advocate for human rights, daughter of the Civil Rights movement activists, single mother, student of the natural world, and self-proclaimed imperfectionist.  You can find Nina on IG: @writethinkspeak