Today we’d like to introduce you to Lydia Storie
Hi Lydia, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in a small town in Indiana. I now live in Los Angeles and work with creatives in Hollywood to drive social change through popular culture. My career started in the entertainment industry, where I came up as a creative executive. Like many on that path, my first “job” was as an unpaid intern before becoming an executive assistant, and eventually a development executive in scripted film and TV. This wasn’t a role I knew existed until I took that first internship, reviewing and summarizing scripts for a small production company.
One thing that appealed to me about development was the fact that it sits right at the intersection of art and business: it’s both creative and strategic. You’re a bridge between artists, and their vision, and the people who hold the purse strings to fund the making of those stories. But I also entered this world with a deep sense of how influential film and TV are in shaping how we all see the world – think about how the popular sitcom Will & Grace helped to normalize gay and queer relationships in mainstream culture. To me, the most meaningful projects I could work on were those that filled in cultural “gaps,” reflecting underrepresented stories and perspectives that deserve to be in the spotlight.
In 2020, as a new mom navigating a global pandemic, I became acutely aware of care as one of those gaps. With Covid-19 shutdowns and social distancing measures in place, tens of millions of people, including my husband and I, struggled to access child care, aging and disability care. We were trying to balance work and care with no support. When our infant son was diagnosed with developmental delays in March of 2020,the therapy services that could benefit him had been suspended. For me and many others, Covid put into stark relief a lot of dynamics that have existed for a long time, but that can be very easy to overlook until they affect you directly.
That’s where storytelling comes in: we learn so much from the lives of people we see on screen and across popular media, and these stories can help us see beyond our own limited experiences. I was excited to join Caring Across Generations to help ensure that our film and TV stories do a better job reflecting all of the varied experiences people have related to caring for the people in our lives. Seeing these experiences can expand our perceptions of the world, raise awareness of and strengthen our empathy for other people’s realities, and offer road maps for the situations we may one day find ourselves in.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I made a point earlier to note that the stepping stone onto my original career path was an unpaid internship in New York City. An industry that sources its new talent from a pool of people who are fortunate enough to be able to work for free is an industry that is not accessible to the vast majority of rising workers. I recognize now that having support from my family to help me live during my early working years was an advantage that a lot of people don’t have. I would like to see this change so that more people from less represented communities and other regions of the U.S. outside of hubs like Los Angeles and New York have the opportunity to become contributors to our professional creative class and impact the popular culture we all consume.
At the present moment, those of us working in film and TV are all navigating a reorganization of the entertainment industry on the heels of the Covid pandemic and the 2023 WGA and SAG strikes. People are worried about job security and the future of production. It’s definitely a bumpy time now, but the optimistic side of me believes we are still moving in the direction of a more inclusive entertainment culture. Since I started my career over 15 years ago, I’ve felt a real shift toward more intentionality about which and how stories are told. And who is telling them. There’s still plenty of room to improve, but it’s happening.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Drawing from my background as a creative executive, I now work with screenwriters, filmmakers and producers to expand the care-related stories we see on screen. Specifically, I consult on film and TV projects that depict aging and disability care to help storytellers capture important nuances and avoid pitfalls. I’ve developed resources, such as the Care Inclusion Playbook to help inspire new story possibilities based on the lived experiences of caregivers across the country. I also facilitate connections between people with lived care experience and industry creatives, and build community among those working in entertainment who have their own experiences related to aging and disability care.
We will all need or provide care at some point in our lives, but it’s not something we think too much about. What we’ve found at Caring Across Generations is that when given the opportunity to reflect on the role of care in their lives, people have a lot to share. It’s a dimension of our human relationships and an aspect of life that carries deep meaning. So I don’t think every story needs to be a “care story” — what I’d love to see is for care to factor into the fabric of the lives of people on screen in a way that is more truly reflective of all of the big and small ways it shows up for all of us. I believe this will shift how we as a society collectively value and support everyone who has care needs or responsibilities. As someone living my own care journey right now and someone with over a decade of experience helping shape film and TV stories, I feel uniquely positioned to help facilitate this expansion in representation.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Two of my favorite recent examples of stories that integrated care along these lines were Netflix’s “Queen Charlotte” and AmazonMGM’s “American Fiction.” They were both really fun, high-concept entertainment that also touched on some really authentic and important nuances related to mental health disability care and the high cost of long-term aging care, respectively. Highly recommend both!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://caringacross.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caringacrossgen/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caringacrossgenerations/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-storie-3b2672b
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lydiastorie
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRrsAaQ8eJf7VFjnZhWjtYQ
Image Credits
Jordan Strauss/Invision for The Television Academy/AP Images
