THE ARTIST YOU ARE: Integrating Identity Into Your Art
A 6-Week Online Course for Emerging Artists
Facilitated by Kayla Kim Votapek
Course Description:
You have been taught the rules of your craft. But have you ever been invited to bring all of who you are into it?
The Artist You Are is a 6-week online course designed for emerging artists ready to stop compartmentalizing their identity and use it as the foundation of their creative practice. Whether you work in acting, playwriting, costume design, directing, or any other discipline, this course will guide you through a deeply personal and practical process of understanding who you are, where you come from, and how that shapes the art you make.
This is not a performance workshop. This is not a diversity training. This is an invitation to show up as your full self and discover that your identity isn't separate from your artistry. It is your artistry.
6-Week Structure
Week 1: Who Are You? Identity Mapping & Personal Narrative
We begin with the most foundational question. Students explore the layers of their identity, culture, family, body, language, and memory, and begin mapping how these elements have shaped who they are. This week establishes a safe, honest container for the work ahead.
Week 2: Where Do You Come From? Ancestry, Culture & Inherited Stories
We go deeper into lineage and cultural context. Students examine the stories they inherited, the ones they were told, the ones they weren't, and the ones living in their bodies without words. This week invites students to explore how history and heritage live inside their creative voice.
Week 3: What Do You Carry? Embodiment, Wound & Wisdom
This week turns toward the body as archive. Students explore what they carry, i.e., grief, pride, contradiction, joy, and how those things show up in their work, whether they intend them to or not. The invitation is to move from unconscious carrying to intentional making.
Week 4: How Do You Make & Who Do You Make For? Identity as Creative Methodology & Relational Artistry
Now we bring identity directly into craft. Students examine how who they are influences how they create — their instincts, their aesthetic choices, their creative blocks, and their breakthroughs. This week is discipline-specific, inviting actors, playwrights, designers, and directors to apply the work to their own practice. But artistry doesn't happen in isolation. We also explore the relational dimension of creative practice: who we collaborate with, who we make work for, and how our identity shapes those relationships. Students explore accountability, representation, and what it means to make work that is in genuine conversation with the community.
Week 5: Bring Your Work Craft, Feedback & Creative Response
This week, students bring a piece of work into the room — a monologue, a design concept, a scene, a piece of writing, a creative artifact of any kind and we look at it together. Through structured, supportive feedback and facilitated discussion, students practice giving and receiving creative responses that deepen the work rather than flattening it. The focus is not on fixing but on listening to what the work is already trying to say and where the maker's identity is living inside it.
****This week also welcomes a special guest artist and/or practitioner who brings their own lens to the conversation, offering students an outside perspective rooted in lived experience and creative practice.
Week 6: Integration Sharing, Witnessing & What Comes Next
The final week is a celebration and a homecoming. Students share something they have made or discovered through the course, a piece of writing, a reflection, a creative artifact, and are witnessed by the group. We close by naming what has shifted and what each student is carrying forward into their practice.
Session Length: 90 minutes once per week via Zoom
Total Contact Hours: 9 hours of live instruction across 6 weeks
Dates:
Week 1: July 7th at 8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
Week 2: July 14th at 8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
Week 3: July 21st at 8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
Week 4: July 28th at8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
Week 5: Aug 4th at 8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
Break/CREATIVE PRACTICE WEEK: Aug 11th
Week 6: Aug 18th at 8:30 pm -10:00 pm EST
*Limited scholarships are available for those who need additional support. If cost is a barrier, please reach out before registering by emailing info@inbetweenartistry.org
Who This Is For:
This course is for you if you are an emerging artist who feels like you have been leaving parts of yourself outside the rehearsal room, the design studio, or the page. If you have ever wondered how your culture, your story, or your lived experience fits into your creative practice, this course was made for you. No matter your discipline, if you make things and you're ready to make them more fully as yourself, you belong here.