While Americans learned the tooth fairy, I was taught Oke buru ezem, let the rat carry my teeth. The Igbo tradition involves throwing your tooth on the roof after it falls out. If you were a good child, a rat would take your tooth and it’ll grow back straight. Because according to my dad, rats, of course, have straight teeth. Otherwise, a lizard will take your tooth and it’ll grow crooked. Lifetimes of oral storytelling in my blood - the oral stories told to me as an Igbo-American created a world counter to the one outside my home. Seeing double early on, fueled my unconscious talent for storytelling, as I was always conscious of the dichotomies within lifes’ stories. Even though my parents stoked the fires of storytelling, they were against me pursuing a creative career. In high school, I was taught the word STEM. But at Middlebury college, I had experiences like “accidentally” ending up in the arts building, taking a ballet class in green chinos. Creative education gave me permission to access my body’s language. When I told my family and Bright Prospect, a college-preparatory program for low-income high-schoolers, I wanted to take a year off to create a portfolio and apply to arts school, there was active resistance. I persevered. That year, I discovered what artist I wanted to be. I facilitated classes at Pieter Dance Center, I collaborated with elementary school children at Kipp-Empower-Academy to create rap music videos about social justice and I interviewed my southern-california multicultural community to preserve collective memory. My emergence into my community through art helped me discover I want to inspire the next generation of cultural workers. I want to make art/media with people who are not “artists”. I want to creative direct someone’s everyday life and tell them “You too are Hollywood. In fact, you are better.” Now, the question I ask myself before I start a project is, what does my community need, what conversations does my community need to have? After successfully transferring to USC as a Film Production major, I practiced this line of inquiry. I discovered the Nigerian Civil War (1967-69) is cloaked in silence within my Igbo-Nigerian community. My mother only remembers the sound of the foreign aid planes. My ten-year old dad remembers wanting to serve. I asked myself - why is this moment of history not being discussed in Nigerian popular culture - music, film, dance, etc. If I want to see what this period looked like for everyday people, I have two hundred Getty images to choose from and a few interviews from a cnbc newscast. These politicized images produced by western media directly contrast the oral stories I am unearthing in my own community. Being creative, allows me to reimagine true stories that could not or will not be captured. Whether in the case of re-archiving Igbo history or telling a story about the people of my hometown, I use the arts to transfer ownership of narratives to the community, by creating in conversation with them. I am constantly imagining new ways to do this. As a recent recipient of the JGS Fellow Program, I am creating lesson plans to facilitate a creative virtual reality workshop in my community. I am engaging high school students of the Bright Prospect community to be an example of what their future can hold. My artist experiences are cyclically engendered. I create, reflect, and learn communally - everyone transforming and seeing each other differently. The outpouring of emotions when my community sees projects we created lets me know I am on the right path.