Ann Leigh

Joined April 2025

16 stories

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Stories (16)

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The Sound That Stays: Kelly Ye and the quiet work of preservation in a listening age.
As the last bell fades into silence, Kelly Ye does not rush to fill the space. She lets it breathe. The air holds the resonance for a moment longer than expected; a shimmer suspended between sound and stillness, before her hands lower, calm and precise. It is in this interval that Ye’s work reveals itself most clearly. Not only in what is heard, but in what is preserved. Not only in performance, but in stewardship.
By Ann Leigh12 days ago in Humans
Learning in Motion: Xuan Zhao Is Rewriting the Rules of Improv, Language, and Connection
As the late afternoon light thinned into evening in a rehearsal room somewhere between Midtown and downtown Manhattan, Xuan Zhao stood barefoot, testing the weight of a story before letting it speak. A chair sat a few feet away, unoccupied but charged, waiting to become a partner. Somewhere beyond the walls, the city moved at its familiar, unforgiving speed of trains, footsteps, and voices overlapping in a constant improvisation of their own. Inside the room, Zhao paused, inhaled, and began again. This moment, quiet and unglamorous, carries the signature of her work: attention sharpened by motion, play disciplined into purpose, and the belief that something alive can happen if you trust the room enough to meet it honestly.
By Ann Leigh12 days ago in Humans
The Worlds Between: Mashael Alqahtani Writes the Space Where Fear Meets Freedom
When Mashael Alqahtani says she wanted “a career doing what made me feel less alone,” she isn’t confessing a sentiment so much as mapping a survival strategy. For her, writing was never a hobby or even a goal; it was a practice of return, a ritual learned young from a small red diary gifted by her aunt after watching The Princess Diaries. In that notebook, a child’s loneliness began to mutate into story. The entries weren’t purely autobiographical; they were miniature worlds refracted through humor and exaggeration, the kind of half-true imaginings that made discomfort not just bearable but shapable. “I learned how to interrogate my feelings,” she recalls. “It made me feel comforted by myself and the power of my own imagination.”
By Ann Leigh2 months ago in Interview
Reach With Care
She remembers the exact moment cinema rearranged her interior life: fourteen, alone, fooled and then astonished by a mockumentary that felt truer than truth. The memory is tactile; the flush of embarrassment when she discovered the film was invented, the slow, astonished recognition that fiction could nonetheless hold a deeper honesty. That hinge, the willingness to let feeling stand for fact, is the smallest and clearest key to Ana Flávia Veiga’s work. It explains why she moves between formats with a trader’s calm, why a palm tree can become a witness in a documentary, why a ninety-second vertical can teach lessons that fund a quieter feature. Her practice is at once pragmatic and moral: make room for feeling, then build the systems to hold it.
By Ann Leigh3 months ago in Humans
Riffs, Rust, and Reprises
They started at a kitchen table that smelled faintly of coffee and late-night resolve; two figures leaning into a phone’s tinny microphone, trading terrible recordings until one stubborn riff refused to stay terrible. That small, domestic scene is the origin myth Violet Palms keeps returning to: a lamp, a chipped mug, a guitar leaning against a chair. For Ben Feiner and Marcus Truschinski the table is less a prop than a proving ground; a compressed time capsule where a single chord, a line of melody, or a tossed-off rhythm can reorder everything that follows.
By Ann Leigh3 months ago in Humans
Maps and Echoes
They recorded the EP like a furtive confession: four songs, two days, a suburban strip-mall studio that sat ten minutes from the house he’d finally stopped flying away from. The room was ordinary in the way that matters: good walls, decent microphones, someone who knew how to catch the air in a take, and Alex Benjamin treated it like a small theater. Morning light pooled across the console, the players arrived with coffee, charts, a quiet hunger. There was no gilding, no time for indulgence. That constraint, he says, was the design principle: make decisions now or watch the idea die under the weight of better options.
By Ann Leigh3 months ago in Humans
Rooted in Light: The Biophilic Vision of Binh Nguyen Duc
Binh Nguyen Duc operates at a rare intersection where the primal rhythms of the natural world merge with the precision of advanced technology. A Los Angeles–based artist and architectural designer, his decade‑long practice spans immersive 3D installations for quantum‑computing lobbies, half‑million‑dollar courtyard activations on research campuses, and brand‑defining environments for entertainment and life‑sciences agencies. For Binh, design is not about spectacle—it is an ongoing dialogue. “Absorbing all relevant context, not getting sidetracked from the big picture of what’s at stake, and preserving the purity of the design idea,” he explains, guides every decision, from the vein patterns he traces in leaf venation to the collaborators he chooses to translate vision into form.
By Ann Leigh6 months ago in Interview
Majiye Uchibeke: Echoes of Port Harcourt
Before the accolades, before the awards, before the festivals and the fashion label, there was a boy in Port Harcourt listening to his grandfather’s voice. He spoke of cunning tortoises and fallen tricksters. He taught that every shell holds secret cracks. Those tales shaped the way Majiye Uchibeke sees the world. Today he turns those same rhythms into films that shake you to your core. Two–time DGA Student Award winner. BAFTA nominee. Visionary force reshaping cinema, streaming, and social impact. But at the origin, it was just story: raw, human, alive.
By Ann Leigh6 months ago in Interview
Stories by the Numbers with Hugo Deutsch
He moves through the world of numbers as though each spreadsheet were a storyboard. Hugo Deutsch arrived in Miami with Parisian confidence and a restless curiosity, determined to prove that finance need not be arid or abstract. He believes in narrative as much as in balance sheets. For him, every deal unfolds like a film: characters in motion, rising tension, unexpected reversals, final resolution. Today he stands at the intersection of artistry and analytics, crafting what he calls “story scaffolds” to transform raw data into immersive experiences.
By Ann Leigh6 months ago in Interview
The Resonant Dialogue of Akiko Hosaki
The first time Akiko Hosaki sat at a harpsichord, the world shifted beneath her fingertips. The instrument’s wooden keys seemed to hum with centuries of memory. She paused, listening as if the echoes of past performances spoke through the planks and pegs. That moment, in a sunlit salon on the French Riviera, revealed something she had long suspected: that the true power of music lies in the spaces between notes, in the conversation unfolding at the keyboard, in the invisible threads that connect performer to composer to audience.
By Ann Leigh6 months ago in Interview
Narrative Alchemy: The Esther Dorgbefu Method
From the bustling markets of Accra to the boardrooms of Chicago, Esther Dorgbefu has forged a career that fuses the ancient art of oral tradition with cutting-edge marketing strategy. In this portrait, we trace her journey from Ghanaian storyteller to global communications architect—revealing how a childhood steeped in narrative gave rise to a philosophy of marketing that prizes authenticity above all else.
By Ann Leigh8 months ago in Interview
Unwritten in Motion: The Artful Journey of Ameia Mikula-Noble
In the predawn hush of an empty theater, Ameia Mikula-Noble stands center stage beneath a single spotlight, arms lifted as if to gather every stray mote of dust in the air. In that suspended moment—a breath before movement—she carries the weight of every classroom she once dreaded, every audition that felt like a spotlighted verdict, and every story she ever wrote to make sense of it all. This is Ameia now: dancer, choreographer, writer, and mentor, who has alchemized doubt into daring, forging a multifaceted practice that is quietly reshaping contemporary dance.
By Ann Leigh9 months ago in Interview