Neriah Kharece

I attribute my success to my child, who is my biggest motivator, but also to the fact that sometimes you just don't have a choice - it's sink or swim. When I was laid off, it was a big revelation that I didn't want to be in that situation again, so I was super motivated to never go back to the bottom of having literally nothing. I wanted my child to be comfortable and not have to go through that. Another motivator is that there's not a lot of Black women leaders in my industry. You don't see a lot of people that look like me in C-suites, as studio owners, or as executive producers winning awards. I wanted to be one other person that can say, hey, I did it, and you can too, even in my circumstances. That's why I'm super proud of even the small film festival wins I've been able to get. It feels good to just be like, yeah, I'm just like a nobody over here, but I was able to do something. These things play in the back of my head as I think about purpose and why I don't give up and keep going.

The best advice I got was from a fellow cinematographer friend when I was getting really caught up on reputation and worrying about what people were saying. I was very stressed out and had a lot of anxiety about how I looked, how I seemed, or how I came off. The advice was basically that at the end of the day, people are going to perceive you how they perceive you, but you know what your truth is. As long as you know that you're being professional, you're always moving in a well-intended way, you're moving honestly, and you're staying booked, you're doing something right. You can't get caught up in not taking gigs because you're worried about how you'll look, or telling everybody yes because you don't want to come off a certain way. That really just diminishes your work and what you want to do, because you're taking work that doesn't align with your purpose and your goals and what you know your best work to be. You're getting caught up in what other people are thinking, but at the end of the day, you're still getting booked, people still want to work with you. Focus on the people that when you walk into the room, they understand you, they get you, they know who you are, they see the vision. You kind of have to let the rest roll off, because people that are not going to get it, they're just not going to get it anyway. The work that's meant to find me is gonna find me.

My biggest advice is to bet on yourself and be a little delusional. A lot of people get caught up in not having enough experience, thinking maybe they need to go to school, or they don't have any connections. What I learned from my experience was literally just be delusional and show up in these rooms like you're supposed to be there, and introduce yourself. I'm actually very introverted, but I kind of taught myself and pretended long enough to make it work. You really do have to get out of your shell and just show up and make yourself visible. Visibility is huge. I was so introverted and didn't want to go to networking events, or I would go but hang back, and that's not really gonna get you seen. When you show up, you can't show up in the room like you're not supposed to be there, or like you're a fraud, or with imposter syndrome. You're in the room, you're there for a reason, because you're supposed to be, and you kind of have to take ownership of the fact that you know what you're talking about, you went to school, you've done things, you know what you're doing. Give yourself the praise that you deserve, because no one's gonna see the value in you until you do it first. Once I started doing that, people started to advocate for me when I wasn't even in the room. That's how you become memorable. Don't feel like you're not supposed to be in a room. Show up, make yourself visible, and own your worth.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is AI. On the marketing side, there's a misunderstanding of what AI could be for creatives in marketing and corporate spaces. It should really just be enablement, but unfortunately what we're seeing is AI being used to phase processes out or phase people out of set processes. I have coworkers that are genuinely scared that AI is gonna take their jobs, which is horrible. People are genuinely scared that they're gonna lose their jobs and their livelihoods are going to be changed forever. The last couple of months, that's all we've talked about - AI, and how can we use AI, and what can we do with the gems, and Gemini, and Claude. Everyone's struggling with how to integrate it while holding the fear of, well, am I essentially training this thing to take my job? I personally don't think that AI could ever do that, because I have a strong belief that you can't replace humanity. There's certain contexts that, as a human, you have, and things that you bring from your childhood and your life and your experiences that you bring to what you create that a machine can't duplicate. There's also taste and quality - you can't really teach a machine taste because it's subjective. As a creative person, I would hope that companies would look around and say, okay, yeah, technically we could do this with Gemini, but is it gonna have a soul? On the film side, it's still a big topic around diverse stories. All we're getting now is the same five actors always on screen, telling the same stories, a lot of reboots, a lot of nostalgia. I think people are kind of hungry for real, authentic, original stories from different communities, and we're kind of reverting backwards in some way.

The values most important to me are empowerment, systems, structures, hard work, being seen, and enjoying life. I carry pretty much the same thought process through everything I touch. I'm really passionate about empowerment. In corporate, there's this unspoken rule of seeing what's wrong but just being like, well, that's just how it is, that's just how it should be. I'm always saying no, it doesn't have to be that way, we actually can change it, we actually can do something about it. We're not just little cogs - we're in the weeds every day and we understand the work on a level that leadership will never understand, so we should feel empowered to come to meetings or projects and say, hey, that's not gonna work, here's why. I'm very big on systems and structures because I don't believe that creative work should be stressful. The whole point of being a creative, artistic person is that it's fun, it's expressive, it's beautiful. It should be therapeutic, it should be peaceful, we should all be feeling seen and heard through our art. When we go into these jobs and they strip all of that and it's just business, business, business, it doesn't have to be that. We can still be fun and expressive but also meet our objectives. I have this belief that life is too short, but life is also incredibly long. Life is too short to take it for granted, but also, life is really long, we're gonna probably be here a minute, so let's enjoy it. It shouldn't just be pay bills and die. Life should be enjoyable. I'm not gonna let my job stress me out - we're not curing cancer, we don't work for the CDC, we are making 30-second Instagram clips. At the end of the day, who cares? Everyone just needs to breathe and relax. Enjoy life. It does not have to be hell, and it really is what you make it.