At the heart of the most beautiful and important work is the act of world building. For us, it is the conceiving of the dream wardrobe for our best-imagined lives so that they might be made real, but world building touches everything that truly matters: the parent who creates the universe as they want it to be for their child, the partner who cultivates the soft contours of home, the activist who shows us the worlds that might be possible were we all to be the best versions of ourselves, the artist who captures what it is like to gaze at other stars so that we might more gracefully find our way by our own, and the storyteller who puts it all down in word or vision or labor of love.
The daughter of a powerful storytelling mother and a Native artist, actor, and activist father and grandfather, Tafv Sampson has been weaving together the bracing and beautiful threads of luminous world building for her entire life. Her poignant and aching photographic portraits, her lens-of-truth videography, and her distinctly authentic production design work—most recently on the beloved 'Reservation Dogs'—is the inheritance of generations of potent chroniclers. We caught up with Tafv in a whirlwind between her now-native Brooklyn and the siren's call of work and the road to talk about the value of vulnerability, the sense of longing and memory inherent in a great photograph, and the surprising gifts of blazing her own next steps on an ancestral path towards owning your own voice.
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