Todd's love of cross-disciplinary collaborations led him to create a pop-up experience that matches poets and filmmakers for a filmmaking intensive. The first Hothouse 48-Hour Poetry Film Challenge was hosted in Minneapolis in May 2019 with programming support from Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Loft Literary Center, and Motion504. It paired four poets and four filmmakers on a Friday, and premiered the results for a Sunday crowd.
The emphasis of the project is on artists of color. It's designed to build skills, nurture creativity, and foster new collaborations. 2020 saw an expansion of the project to a week-long filmmaking intensive involving five teams of artists. Read about it in the Star Tribune.
It was invigorating. Collaborations are balms for an artist’s process.
It’s a great way to check in across disciplines about how your work is
in conversation with other creatives in your community. We exchanged tools
to strengthen each other’s work and created a new way to wonder, to draft.
— Donte Collins, Hothouse 2019 alumni poet
The inaugural Hothouse has since spawned a week-long iteration—complete with a youth institute—now available for pop-up in cities nationwide. More details here.
Hothouse 2019 alum Ryan Stopera, who is now Hothouse Producer.
I stole the name Hothouse from a now-defunct Playwrights' Center program. I love how it captures the energy of nurture as well as the idea of forced growth. Hothouse evolved from an impulse to take what Motionpoems does and bring it to specific communities in real time, investing in process, the artists, and their skills. I couldn't be more excited about it.
