Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sammi Cannold. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Sammi, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I was a competitive debater in high school and got to travel around the country most weekends to participate in national circuit debate tournaments. The competitive nature of the ‘sport’ meant that you could never be too prepared, you could never do enough research, and you could never practice enough. That relentless pursuit of excellence was unexpectedly amazing training for freelance artist life, wherein you have to be exceptionally disciplined because you often don’t have someone holding you accountable for pushing the various boulders you’re pushing up various hills. It also helped that debate was such an all-consuming activity that I had to lean how to get my school work done in and around it — and I find that, for freelance artists, time management and being able to essentially invent more time where there isn’t any is profoundly important.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am a freelance director working on Broadway, off Broadway, regionally, and in film and television.
What I love most about what I get to do for my profession is that I get to work in many different adjacent industries — I’ve now directed musicals, plays, live television, opera, a narrative short film, a documentary feature film, and events — I’m also starting to work in ceremony direction as well and hope to start directing episodic TV and narrative feature film too. As a director, I love getting to go between mediums because I find the basic storytelling skillset is largely the same and it’s about learning the mechanics and language of each medium. This means that when presented with a given story, I can try to steer it towards the medium that feels best to tell it in vs. having to default to the only medium in which I’m trained. This approach has been something I’ve been working at very intensely the past few years — I went to school for theater, so came into the professional world with a baseline skillset there, but in the past 2 – 3 years, I’ve read every book I can, listened to every podcast I can, spoken to and observed every colleague to learn the art-forms I wasn’t trained in initially and to be as prepared as possible to go between.
At the moment, I’m particularly excited about two new musicals I’m working on this fall, a narrative short film I directed that I’m submitting to festivals at the moment, and a feature film that my husband and I just finished writing together.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I would say: determination, resourcefulness, and resilience.
Determination because — these industries are just so hard to make it in — and there are vastly more people who want to work in them than available positions/resources. So, in my opinion, being fiercely determined to do what you love to do is critical to actually getting to do it, for better or worse.
Resourcefulness because — making work in the arts is like the wild west. There are not textbook career paths and there are not textbook ways of making. So, you have to be really creative both about how you get opportunities and how you make art. In this moment of time, I think a lot of that manifests in being good at and strategic about email. Most projects I work on start with a slightly crazy email — either from me or to me — that asks “What if…” And I’m a big believer that the number of “What if…” emails you send has a positive relationship to the number of things you ultimately get to make even if 9/10 of those emails result in nothing.
And resilience because — making art is predicated on the idea that not everything you make will be universally beloved, you won’t get to finish every project you start, and stability isn’t a given even at the height of your career. So, being able to bounce back and approach each new day with excitement is both challenging and critical.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
I think this answer is not unique to me, both in the arts and in life in general, but time management is definitely my greatest obstacle and challenge. This year, I’ve done a lot of work to put certain systems in place that help me to be better at it.
So, I work with an amazing assistant named Max Rodriguez who helps me with a lot of research, ideation, project management, etc. and that collaboration is hugely helpful in managing time.
Additionally, I’ve learned how I work and focus — and until this year, I was wasting so much time hemming and hawing about tasks I didn’t want to do instead of just doing them. So, now, I use a website called Flow Club (which is much more expensive than I’d like it to be, but amazing) that helps me stay on task and get things done.
For directors, who are often in rehearsal from 10 – 6 every day or on set for 12+ hours and then come home to a mountain of emails/scripts to read/staging prep to do, etc., figuring out systems for staying on top of things and not behind is essential — especially if you also want to have a life outside of your job.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sammicannold.com/
- Instagram: @sammi.cannold
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rose2280
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sammi-cannold-16222968/
- Twitter: @sammicannold
Image Credits
Brooke Almond Jeremy Daniel Leah Portis Gretjen Helene Curtis Brown
