Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Shippen, Briggon Snow and Jordan Cope.
It all started with ‘The Bright Sessions’; the popular fiction podcast by Lauren Shippen first premiered in 2015, and quickly became a juggernaut in the audio space. After the initial run of the show ended in 2018, there was a desire to tell new stories within the Bright Sessions universe in the form of spinoffs, and into new original narratives and ways of pushing the podcast medium to exciting places. Lauren, Briggon, and Jordan were at Patreon’s annual creator conference in 2018 and came up with the idea for Atypical Artists; a way for Lauren to manage the many upcoming projects she had slated, for Briggon, an actor and longtime collaborator of Lauren’s, to grow as a creator and utilize his previous experience as part of the digital team at dick Clark productions, and for Jordan to transition from his work at Patreon into building a company from the ground up.
The three cofounded Atypical Artists and launched in January 2019, with Lauren Shippen as owner and CEO, Jordan Cope as COO and Briggon Snow as VP Digital, rounding out the original brain trust of the company. The company launched its inaugural shows, ARCS (an actual play podcast) and the first spinoff of The Bright Sessions, ‘The AM Archives’. The former, created by Jordan Cope, and the latter, Lauren’s exploration into the darker elements of the Bright Sessions universe, and one of the new podcast platform Luminary’s first class of premium shows. Behind the scenes of this timeline of events were three friends who enjoyed being around each other, liked making things together, and decided to take a leap to get a chance at empowering the kind of storytelling they want to see in the world.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The journey to Atypical Artists took some time, initially born out of Lauren’s desire to make something of her own, disappointed in the roles she was seeing in front of her as a young actress in Hollywood. When Lauren made The Bright Sessions, it was a stab in the dark to see if she could write and produce a show with actors she knew and wanted to work with. The success of The Bright Sessions was a mix of luck from a rising tide of podcasts at that time, and countless hours of writing, producing and promoting. By the time the show had reached its peak of popularity, Lauren was able to move onto new stories. The easiest part of the journey was deciding on partners Jordan and Briggon when it came time to level up and make Atypical Artists.
Please tell us about Atypical Artists.
Atypical Artists is built on the belief that to make the most compelling stories, you need to empower a diverse and passionate set of creators; in other words, make neat stuff, with neat people. Founded by Lauren Shippen, Jordan Cope and Briggon Snow in 2019, Atypical Artists is an all-in-house production studio cultivating fresh narratives across a wide-breadth of entertainment mediums, from a core background of fiction podcast storytelling. The team’s expertise in making audio drama podcasts from soup to nuts has Atypical Artists uniquely poised to help push the medium even further and bring audio storytelling to a whole new group of listeners.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Empathy; empathy is everything in what we’re doing. To be able to create stories that matter, we need to tap into what excites us and what we feel is needed out there in the audio space. One of the greatest joys of creating podcasts with diverse, inclusive and compassionate narratives is when our listeners tell us that they see themselves in it, or that they understand another person because of it. As artists our job is to live in empathy so we can all see that despite our surface differences, we’re all the same; it’s what connects us. Storytelling is the greatest thing humans ever created, and to be human is to live and tell stories, and to have an impact and a platform like Atypical Artists is a huge responsibility that we’re so excited and grateful to have.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.atypicalartists.co
- Instagram: @atypicalartists
- Twitter: @atypicalartists
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