MORE THAN

MORE THAN CHILD'S PLAY

Meet three creative alums who are bringing their own deeply personal perspectives to the world of children’s media, using television, music, and books to reach a generation growing up in a time of social change and shifting values

BY JONATHAN ADOLPH

FOR MUCH OF HER 20-YEAR CAREER AS A TELEVISION DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER,

Koyalee Chanda was often “the only person of color in the room,” she recalls. Today, as vice president for kids and animation at Hello Sunshine, the award-winning production company founded in 2016 by Reese Witherspoon, she is embracing the opportunity to open doors for other storytellers, while “dismantling the preconceived boxes” that limit the complexity of characters in children’s television.

Hello Sunshine, the missiondriven company behind hits such as “Big Little Lies,” “The Morning Show,” and “Little Fires Everywhere,” creates programming with “women at the center of the story,” explains Chanda, who joined the company in January. “So we are now keying o that to do the same for girls—finding stories where the main female characters have agency and are empowered. These are, ideally, highly entertaining series for kids that also push the needle.”

That desire to shape media and society, in part, reflects Chanda’s own experiences at Williston. A day student from Holyoke and the daughter of a prominent obstetrician, she followed her older brother to the school and let her outgoing personality shine, especially in the theater. “I would audition for every play, and I would never get a role, but that didn’t deter me,” she says. “I would do whatever I could to be involved in other ways. I would make props. I would paint the set. I would stage manage if I could. I worked part time in the theater o ce under Ellis Baker. I found my love of theater at Willison.”

But when the school held tryouts for a Tennessee Williams play, Chanda was told that the production had too many racial undertones and there just wasn’t a part for her, she recalls. “It was explicitly told to me that I did not fit the bill racially to be cast,” she says. “So I just didn’t work on that particular production. And that was a moment of real clarity for me.”

Chanda didn’t give up on the theater program and now sees that experience as a mobilizing moment for her, and an illustration of how the decisions of show creators can have broad impact. “The plays that were chosen had these racial specificities that I think boxed the casting in, in a way that was unfortunately exclusionary to people who didn’t fit into one of those boxes,” she says, adding with a laugh that she knows she’s “a terrible actor” and may not have gotten a part anyway. “But definitely the idea of wanting more representation and inclusion in casting, and even the choice of content, became very central to my career.”

That career took o right after Chanda’s graduation from Wesleyan University, where she majored in theater (she also holds a director’s certificate from New York University). Hired on to what was then a fledgling children’s program called “Blue’s Clues,” she began as a production coordinator (and the voice of Blue’s friend Magenta) but within a year was directing. “I don’t think anybody realized how big it was going to become,” says Chanda, who would eventually direct some 30 episodes as the show became an international phenomenon. “It was such an amazing training ground for me in terms of how to communicate with kids.”

From there, Chanda formed her own production company, creating content for Sesame Street Workshop, PBS Kids, Nickelodeon, and others. She was the voice director for Nickelodeon’s “Backyardigans,” produced the pilot for PBS’s “Odd Squad,” and was co-executive producer of Nickelodeon’s hit series “Wallykazam!” In 2018, she produced the family podcast “This Podcast Has Fleas,” an audio cartoon about a dog and cat with competing podcasts. After moving to Los Angeles to work in creative development at Apple, she was hired by “Doc McStu ns” creator Chris Nee to work on Netflix programming, then made the move to Hello Sunshine. Over the years, her work has been nominated for seven Emmy awards.

Now living in Culver City with her husband and two daughters, ages 7 and 12, Chanda looks back at her time at Williston as an important period in her life. “It’s all formative and really incredibly valuable,” she says. She recalls how there was just one other South Asian girl on campus, who looked and acted nothing like her, and yet teachers often confused the two of them. Still, she says, she stayed close to the faculty in the theater department, “and I got an opportunity to assistant direct my senior year, which was amazing.”

Her experiences continue to inform her work today with Hello Sunshine, where she has a number of animated children’s shows in the pipeline. “You can’t work in kids’ content and not have a really keen sense of how much impact you can have over your audience,” she says. “Our goal is to make content that all kids can enjoy, but really be focused on making sure those girl characters are complex and funny and engaging and smart and empowered.”

Speaking in August in a livestream discussion titled Talking About Race With Children: How Storytellers can Facilitate Important Conversations, she o ered this broader assessment of being a content creator for a young audience: “Not only do you need to make sure you are creating content that is really engaging, you have to do right by them. And do right by this world…. We may not have all the tools at this moment to tell all the exact right stories to rise to this challenge, but we are certainly going to try. And we are always looking for people to help us do that in the best and most authentic way possible. So bring it on!”

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Beginning at “Blue’s Clues,” Koyalee Chanda has created content for a host of companies, earning seven Emmy nominations

A FAMILY LEGACY, PUT TO MUSIC

PIERCE FREELON ’02

PIERCE FREELON’S NEW ALBUM OF CHILDREN’S MUSIC WAS BORN OUT OF

SILENCE. A politician, filmmaker, teacher, musician, and entrepreneur, Pierce is the son of Phil Freelon, architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon. After his father was diagnosed with ALS in 2016, Pierce, then a professor at the University of North Carolina with a wife and two young children, would visit him often. “We’d talk and reminisce and play chess and watch TV, and eventually we’d run out of things to talk about,” he recalls. “I’d be scrolling through my phone and show him videos of Halloween parties, playing basketball, and spending time with his grandkids. It was a deeply emotional time, a vulnerable time, and a creative time for me.”

Full of ideas, Freelon would leave his father’s house and go right to his studio to start working with the clips and voice memos he’d discovered, putting them to beats, adding vocals. The next day, he’d share the compositions with his father. “I’d give him some headphones,” he says. “He would rock out, give me feedback.”

When his father died in 2019, the songs were still just fragments. Freelon set about completing them, and found revisiting his digital family archive both cathartic and healing. “People grieve in di erent ways,” he explains. “Some people sob, some eat ice cream. For me, music was my grieving tool.”

What eventually emerged is D.a.d., an album that uses hip-hop, soul, and electronic music to create what Freelon describes as “a family journal chronicling the life and times of a Black millennial father living in the South.” The topical and heartfelt songs—with titles such as “Tuck Me In,” “Gather Your Clothes,” “Movies and Popcorn and Video Games,” and “Daddy Daughter Day”—are interspersed with voice memos featuring Freelon and his children, Justice, now 12, and Stella, 10, who also performs on the record. The album ends with a voice memo of his late father’s advice on being an artist, and a last song, “Ascend,” “about becoming a phoenix and being fearless and resilient in the face of change.”

Making a children’s music album is just the latest achievement in Freelon’s multifaceted career. In the years since graduating from Williston, he has earned a B.A. in African and African American studies at UNC Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Pan African studies at Syracuse University; founded Blackspace, a digital makerspace for local youth in Durham; toured and recorded with his jazz/hip-hop quartet, The Beast; co-founded the Emmy Award- winning PBS web series Beat Making Lab, in which he travels the world teaching kids hip-hop and music production; and taught political science, music, and African American studies at UNC and North Carolina Central University. In 2017, he ran for mayor of Durham on a platform of “community, growth, youth, and love.” He was appointed this year to the Durham City Council, and is continuing work as the writer, composer, and co-director of The History of White People in America, an animated musical series (three episodes are on YouTube) that reexamines our country’s racial past through a format he describes as “somewhere between Hamilton and Schoolhouse Rock!”

Freelon’s eclectic interests were evident even in his days at Williston, where he played football but also starred as Sky Masterson in a multicultural production of Guys and Dolls. Growing up in Durham, he transferred to the school as a sophomore, following his sister Maya (named for Maya Angelou, a family friend), and reveled in the diversity he discovered. “Williston exposed me to the world at a really crucial time in my development,” he says, noting that one of his roommates was a fellow football player from Brooklyn with roots in Trinidad, another was a hip- hop fan from Taiwan, a third was a Moroccan by way of Canada who spoke French and Arabic. “There was such a rich international community in my peer group. I always felt very comfortable interacting with people of radically di erent cultures.”

One Williston connection in particular had a lasting impact, Freelon recalls: Sherrie-Ann Gordon ’00, who was two grades above him and a charismatic presence on campus. “My first time rapping in a proper venue was at Williston, as a part of her senior project,” he recalls, “It was a hip-hop show with dance, performance, and poetry, and that was a really special creative experience for me.” Gordon died from cancer in 2015, Freelon notes, but he remembers her in particular for “the joy that she brought to creative Pierce Freelon’s first album for children features contributions from his daughter, Stella, and voice recordings of his late father, architect Phil Freelon. spaces and the way that she looked out, especially for the Black students on campus, in a very nurturing way.”

Freelon’s new album, his first for children, clearly shares that sense of creative joy and a nurturing spirit. But as a Black artist in the children’s music field, he understands that his work also carries a political message. “I’ve learned from studying Black feminist thinkers that the personal is political,” he explains. “And so my personal story has political implications in the broader marketplace of children’s music, where Black voices are seldom heard, and Black fathers even less so. There are certain stereotypes around Black masculinity and fatherhood, thinly veiled racist stereotypes, that aren’t true. That certainly wasn’t my experience.”

Which returns us to Phil Freelon, and how his son’s work is passing along the values he stood for. “If you have a loving parent, you don’t always think about the ways they’ve loved or cared for you, until they’re gone,” Freelon notes. “This album was really a product of reflecting on, How was he a great dad? How did he parent? How did he love me? And how is that love manifested in

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abundance in my life?”

CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR AND PUBLISHING ENTRE-

PRENEUR Kimberly (Lindsey) Gordon loved writing ever since she was a little girl, but never thought it could be her career. At Williston, the Franklin, Mass., native channeled her considerable energy into athletics, captaining the track team for three years, and playing field hockey and basketball. When she discovered the school’s Writers’ Workshop program, she “fell in love with it,” she recalls. “We met authors. We had seminars. I was exposed to a whole community of individuals that were publishing books, traveling the world. But I just didn’t ever connect that as something that I could possibly do.”

After graduation, Gordon earned her B.A. at Simmons, majoring in communications (with minors in English and Africana studies) followed by an M.A. in communications from Columbia. She found success in the business world, specializing in digital marketing for the College Board and Reed Business Information, among others. “I loved it,” she says. “But corporate America just wasn’t a fit for me.” In 2010 she decided to start her own company, Gordon Business Solutions, providing digital marketing for a range of clients, one of which happened to be a publisher of children’s books. Working on that project gave Gordon a glimpse of a lesser known facet of the writer’s world: the marketing side. “That opened my eyes to what being an author was,” she recalls. “And how important what I knew—marketing—was to becoming an author.”

A few years later, now married with two young daughters, Gordon was shopping when her 3-year-old asked for a doll that was “like her.” They couldn’t find one. “If there was an African American doll, she didn’t feel it was like her. So I had to explain to her business and marketing through this conversation. And, I was like, This is a great book idea.”

Inspired, the author in Gordon emerged. The result was A Doll Like Me, a picture book, published in 2015, that tells the story of a girl named Mia who wants a doll that is as individual as she is, “a chocolate ballerina” who wears a purple superhero cape, has curly hair, and plays the guitar. When she can’t find one at the local stores, Mia and her friends, with the help of her fashion-designer mother, make their own, and soon are selling their custom doll kits to the other kids in town.

“It’s about starting a business and following your dreams, staying dedicated and focused,” Gordon explains. “That’s something of importance to me, raising my kids with that mindset, which I did not know. I’m educating the next generation about things that I have learned, and continue to learn, in the business world, but in language that they can understand.”

To support the book, Gordon transformed her marketing business into a publishing company, 5D Media, and soon had spun o a coloring book version of A Doll Like Me titled Black Girl Boss. She has since written a number of other books, including I Am a Dancer Every Day of the Week (which she also illustrated— she is a former Scholastic Gold Key art award winner), about how practice leads to accomplishment, and A Day With Uncle Bembe, in which a boy experiences the work of his businessowning uncle. Now, five years later, 5D Media has published more than a dozen books, with others in the pipeline, including adult nonfiction titles on addiction and recovery, spirituality, and personal growth. This year, Gordon notes, her focus is on nonfiction children books and workbooks to support the diversity initiatives of school districts, parents, and homeschooling families. The company also produces school curricula and digital streaming content to support the books, selling to school districts primarily in the New York City area but also around the country and internationally.

Underlying both the children’s and adult titles is what Gordon calls “a deeper message” of personal empowerment and human potential. “The aim of 5D Media content is to help an individual grow and transform into who they want to be,” she explains, adding that an earlier marketing project for a recovery group introduced her to the social and personal costs of addiction. Being who you want to be requires having a clear mind, she says, which is not possible if you are controlled by drugs or alcohol. That realization led her to publish addiction and selfhelp content, “as we could not help the children without also helping the parents, teens, and young adults.”

That message of growth is reflected in her personal life as well. “I had to transform into the person that I am today,” says Gordon, who not only manages her business, with its six

The writing career of entrepreneur Kimberly

Gordon began with A

Doll Like Me and the coloring book version,

Black Girl Boss. employees, from the New York City home she shares with her entrepreneur husband, but also homeschools her two daughters, now ages 9 and 6. “I have to have a schedule for everything—my husband’s schedule, my kids’ schedule, my schedule. I have my own business meeting, then I have a business meeting with my husband, then I have a business meeting with my sta . With my kids, we have a meeting before bed. We have goals. I learned how to run my family like a business in order to survive.”

That confidence to take on challenges, Gordon notes, has its roots in her Williston experience. “The community, the support system— which I didn’t have in college—I felt that from my first campus visit,” she recalls. “I still love it to this day. I’m still friends with my friends from Williston. That feeling of being on campus has stuck with me and supported my belief that I could venture out and try something new.”

And she continues to do so. This holiday season, 5D Media released Gordon’s The Secret History of Popular Symbols Used in Everyday Life, the first in a series of nonfiction children’s books focused on spiritual

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growth.

2.17.21

SAVE THE DATE! WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2021 Founders Day is your moment to join with the entire Williston Northampton School community to show your pride in the Green and Blue. Uplifted by your support, our faculty and students will continue to meet the challenges of this extraordinary year.

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