Creative Lives Kansas: Lela Meadow-Conner
In this short documentary, the producer and curator talks about how she got into the film industry, wound up in Kansas, and set out on her own after 14 years at the Tallgrass Film Festival.
Welcome to the first installment of Creative Lives // Kansas, a short documentary series created and produced by Ellie Keppy and Ksenya Gurshtein.
Lela Meadow-Conner moved from Los Angeles to Wichita in 2003 to help start the Tallgrass Film Festival alongside the late Tim Gruver. Since leaving Tallgrass in 2017, Meadow-Conner has worked as a producer on short films such as "Cow Heavy and Floral" as well as the feature-length documentary "Chasing Chasing Amy" and the podcast series Green Tide Rising. In 2019, she founded mamafilm to examine parenthood and nurturing through the medium of film. Originally a microcinema, mamafilm now functions as a pop-up film exhibition series.
"There's so many ways in which both fiction and documentary films can incite dialogue in a way that's completely different than reading a book or an article." — Lela Meadow-Conner
Creative Lives // Kansas is an episodic series of short-format videos about art and artists living in or visiting Kansas. Created and produced by Ellie Keppy and Ksenya Gurshtein, the series highlights the work of people in creative professions and pursuits, making art of all types, or otherwise leading creative and unusual lives. Our goal is to inspire viewers to engage with the arts in their community and find their own paths to leading creative lives.
Ksenya Gurshtein is a curator, arts writer, and art historian living in Wichita. As a curator, she has worked at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State, Skirball Cultural Center, and the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. As a scholar and critic, she has written widely on a range of topics in modern and contemporary art. Her work strives to foreground lesser-known histories and stories, look to places and topics that have historically been peripheral to the Western canon, and support the work of arts institutions and artists as agents of social change. More of her writing can be found here.
Ellie Keppy is a public radio nerd, an artist and a producer for Creative Lives Kansas. She is part of the KMUW team and a proud Wichitan since 1991.
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