Down with the Starving Artist
Pictured: This artist refuses to starve! Me (left) in a still from the NOLA Tourism 2024 campaign, chowing down on a po’boy.©️ 2024 New Orleans & Company
“She was largely raised by my grandmother, Tata, as her parents were both artists and constantly struggled with economic instability, substance abuse, and the emotional turmoil that follows.”
This passage, from the cookbook Islas, jumped out at me as I spooned my lunch — homemade Thai curry — into my mouth. For context, the book explores the resiliency of island peoples, their cultures, and cuisines. It interrogates the complex and painful history of colonialism, and how its legacy continues to shape not just the lives of islanders, but the global populace. The line refers to the author’s cousin and her parents. No doubt it is offered with love, empathy, and understanding. But it struck me—an artist—because it echoed a sentiment I’ve been sitting with for a long time:
The artist as unstable.
The artist as poor.
The artist as addicted.
The starving artist.
Pictured: Me prepping to play the titular role in IVP’s Nellie & the Women of Blackwell. Exhausted, depleted but working. COVID would shortly change that.
I remember learning about Van Gogh in elementary school art class. Some kids laughed that he cut off his ear. I just remember thinking, I don’t want to be that.
I remember the reactions of my peers, my guidance counselor, and my teachers when I said I wanted to be an actor. Me: a straight-A student in the “gifted and talented” program. The laughter. The eye rolls. And, of course, the big question: How will you make money?
I remember my mid-twenties in New York. Odd jobs, scraping together just enough to make rent, and living on the cortisol spikes and dopamine hits of a life in survival mode. Add in chronic, unaddressed OCD – all temporarily soothed by the steady flow of free booze from my bartender friends…oftentimes, a bit too much.The allure of escapism, away from both the material and metaphysical conflicts I carried, became stronger than the spiritual imperative to create. I had become the starving artist. And I hated it.
The origins of this stereotype lie in artists disputing unpaid or underpaid labor from patrons and benefactors. But it wasn’t until the Romantic period of the 19th century that socio-economic and emotional suffering was enshrined as a requirement for artistic genius.
“As the centuries-old model of patronage became less relevant to a rapidly modernising world, art became a thing that people did to fulfil a compulsion — because they just had to create — rather than a profession that also paid the bills.”
– Mary McGillivray, The History of the Starving Artist Trope
There’s no doubt that today’s artists face an incredibly challenging economic system. It’s difficult to just survive, let alone thrive. The barriers to making real money as an independent artist are steep. Add to that the time, effort, and lifelong investment required to truly cultivate your craft. The entertainment industry, like so many others, is in the midst of a massive upheaval. Between unstable markets, AI, streaming platforms, diminishing grant funds, and unpredictable audience engagement, it is almost overwhelming to fathom a creative life as anything other than a romantic act of defiance against an indefatigable force set against your very existence.
But I’m here to tell you there is.
I’m not going to be a modern internet snake oil salesman, telling you 10 ways to hack your way to success. But I have realized this: believing in the starving artist trope is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want to live the life you’re called to — creative or not — you must first believe that you are not your suffering. Suffering happens as often as joy. Both are transient states that hold no ultimate authority over your actions. This belief requires practice. For me, it’s reinforced through meditation, journaling, and physical activity.
Pictured: Harry (my husband) and I on May 28th, 2021 — the day we announced we were leaving New York after 12 years and moving to Florida. Lots of emotions, fears and possibility.
On a more logistical front, support matters. I have a husband and a large, deeply supportive family. They don’t coddle me — they challenge me — but they also won’t let me fall through the cracks. I know this is a privilege, and not everyone has it. But I also made real changes to accept that support. I left New York for Florida. I let go of friendships that made me feel small. I sought therapeutic help for my mental health. Every day isn’t easy, but every day is an affirmation that I don’t have to stand in the way of my own fulfillment by clinging to a harmful narrative. My chosen family helps me keep that promise to myself.
Career pivots helped too. I used to believe in the soda fountain myth: sitting pretty somewhere, looking exceptionally marketable, waiting to be “discovered” by someone with the power to make me a star. Then I would live my dream, buy a mansion and reside lovingly in the hearts of my adoring fans ad infinitum. You can see why my disillusionment and dissent into the starving artist trope was inevitable, painful and costly. I built my suppositions on a fairy tale.
I’m reminded of that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas quote:
“We’re looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area…”
Artists and storytellers are the myth-makers of culture. So I ask, do we really want to teach the next generation that genius requires them to become their suffering? Is it beneficial for audiences to believe that the creative act requires horrific conditions and behavior? And what are the ramifications to a society conditioned on perpetual lack? Limitations of a sort can free creativity, but chronic scarcity leads us to behave to our most base impulses: fear, domination and territorialism.
Pictured: Amelia Bartlett (right) and I running the set of How to Get the Girl (2025) our test case for regenerative filmmaking. ©️ df Productions, Jacob Dean
Pictured: Ash Singer (middle) and I in Nellie & the Women of Blackwell (2020), an immersive theatre production where the audience re-lived history. ©️ Scott Wynn
Pictured: Me (far right) at the Jagged Mind 2023) premiere at the American Black Film Festival in Miami. This isn’t even a quarter of the cast and crew. It takes a village.
Instead, I’m collaborating with Amelia Bartlett of a/b studios to build something we call regenerative filmmaking. It’s a model for how filmmakers, communities, and funders can co-create independent work that is high-quality, mutually beneficial, and reinvested directly into the people and places that make the art possible.
With IVP, I’m producing theater and corresponding micro-events to revive the stories of the past and make them vibrantly relevant now. We create immersive, interactive performances that are transmissions of real lives, stories and events. These production values remove the passivity out of theater and history, framing both acts as a living narrative in which we are all complicit.
And yes, I act in mainstream films, TV, and commercials. They not only pay bills, but they connect me to a network of artists, executives and audiences that simply love the art and the process of creating (and enjoying) it.
Because the real trapping of the starving artist trope is that the true genius does it alone.