The art of Ampersand: applying the creative process to podcasting and audio journalism

This thesis project tells two stories, intertwined. The first story is a year in the life of Dominique Moody, an assemblage artist, who struggled to build her magnum opus: a deeply personal tiny home for her to live in, named ""the Nomad."" The second story is a year in the life of a different kind of artist—eleven audio journalists—who built their own deeply personal project: a podcast and multimedia website called Ampersand. ❧ Journalists and artists are surprisingly similar. They're both storytellers, using their chosen medium to convey an idea, or articulate a vision, to a receptive audience. I was one of the eleven, and, after meeting Moody, I realized our vision was the same. Both of us wanted to express our individual voices—one through sight, the other through sound. ❧ Radio journalists are frequently dispassionate narrators, focused on being objective and fact-driven. The rise of podcasting, on the other hand, has offered a venue for first-person expression and individual creative liberty, ideals that seem to mirror art more so than journalism. ❧ I used Moody's more personal artistic style as a model for my own work as Ampersand's executive producer. I hoped to create a podcast with impassioned narrators who each had a distinct creative voice to share—and, in doing so, turn our work into an artistic expression of its own.