Meet Tajianna Okechukwu

Hi Tajianna, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
What’s good ya’ll! My name is Tajianna Okechukwu and I am actor/filmmaker from the Bay Area. As a little girl, I was always fascinated by characters and visuals on screen. My eyes were constantly glued to the TV. I constantly read a lot of books when I was young so fictional storytelling was always a part of my world. I also grew up watching my mom in the arts & entertainment industry so that intrigued me even more, especially after seeing her direct her first feature. My dad was a chauffeur so he was always dropping off celebrities at dinner in a limo or picking them up from the airport in a fancy SUV. I was constantly surrounded by confirmation that my dreams could become my reality. It really also started after a talent scout came up to me in Walmart asking if I wanted to be on TV…so I tugged on my parents t-shirts and said “Mommy! Daddy! I wanna be on TV!”. They said yes and before we knew it, I was being trained in on camera acting by the time I turned double digits. From there, I joined the digital arts learning track in high school where I learned about film production and photography. I also was in drama as an elective which gave me the experience I needed to star in some of the school plays. This was all the catalyst for my college journey where I would leave home to go to school in SoCal and go on to double major in Acting for the Stage and Screen plus Film & TV Studies. Even with breaks along the way, I have always found my way back to entertainment.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
No road is completely smooth – there’s bumps even if they are slight. I have had a lot of naysayers along the way when pursuing a career in acting & film when I was younger and still today after graduating from college. It was cute when I was a little girl but when I actively chose that this is how I want to pay bills, then not so much. People around me have told me that I should “major in something practical” or “find a real job”. Creatives know those statements all too well. Access, resources, and financial backing to elevate my career has been difficult when belonging to an underrepresented demographic. There seems to be a scarce amount of spots for the amount of Black people that can “make it”. There’s long nights and early mornings. It’s tiring because you’re constantly on. If you’re not physically on set, you’re marketing yourself on social media. There’s always something to do but it’s all so worth it to me – I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else. I can’t see myself doing anything else. And I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that God has blessed me immensely with opportunities to get to the next part of my journey so much so that it appears smooth. No path is perfect but yours is perfectly aligned for you.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
So ya’ll know by now that I am a multidisciplinary creative with training & experience in performance and film theory. As a storyteller, I strive to create stories that explore issues through the Black experience. I direct short form content and do event videography in addition to acting in short films and commercial content. I want to create projects that will shift paradigms and shake culture in our society. Pushing the envelope and putting a mirror up to the world so it can look at itself is something I’m very much an advocate for in storytelling. I am always looking to “network across” as Issa Rae says it. And of course, telling stories that center Black livelihood is the biggest value to me as we have been traditionally misrepresented and underrepresented in front and behind the camera since the beginning of cinema. Representation truly does matter and I am dedicated to seeing it through that I use my gifts to model effective ways of what that looks like through entertainment. Lastly, collaborating with my community and those around me is just as important (if not more) as getting to work with a well known creative. Feel free to check out my work and hit me up if you wanna make something powerful together!

How do you think about luck?
The concept of luck is so funny to me! I feel like overall I have “bad luck” in my personal life but in business I have good “luck”. I don’t know if I totally believe in the phenomenon of it because like I said before God’s alignment has been so perfect for me I feel like it’s not just happenstance how stuff has panned out for me thus far. However, I definitely do feel that when it comes to booking gigs back to back or coming across opportunities to build my repertoire. I am “lucky” to be where I’m at.