Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley Samia.
Hi ashley, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m thirty-two and five years into California. I had left Boston. Before that Colorado State, where I studied psychology and biochemistry, a BAS in both, the kind of degree people frame but rarely use. I thought I was looking for something healthier, more authentic—whatever that meant at the time—something outside the apartment complexes and chain restaurants of Massachusetts. Then COVID happened, and the family drama with it, the sense of wanting to escape the echo of my parents’ lives.
When I got here I picked up video editing again. I was alone most of the time, editing, cutting reels, playing with transitions, late nights staring at the glow of a monitor in a borrowed room. On a whim I sent an edit to Ridge Production, a Los Angeles agency. They let me in—first as the intern, then the assistant, then program manager, eventually the main producer. Four years of it: music videos, massive events, planes and hotels and backstage passes that didn’t feel as glamorous as they looked.
Editing became less about the job and more about carving out a version of myself I could stand. Every cut, every frame, some small act of authenticity. The medium gave me permission. I was grateful for it, still am.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, my mother was diagnosed with FTD. Fifty-nine. Too young, a number you can’t say without people blinking. She lives now in a memory home in Ojai. The disease, the fact of it, became a kind of mirror: a reminder that time is brutal, that convenience is death in disguise, that you can choose stagnancy or you can choose life.
Now I’m in Ventura County, the place I wanted without knowing it, closer to my mother, closer to my sister. I’ve shifted from producing to building, working as marketing director and business development manager at my sister’s new flower shop, helping her grow what feels like something rare. It’s quieter but more alive. And for the first time I’m surrounded by people who love me for who I am. I get to give that love back, without conditions.
California is still strange to me—palm trees and highways and impossible light—but it’s where I decided to stop repeating the story I was born into. It’s where I finally decided to be myself.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The hardest part wasn’t the work or the moves or even the losses. It was sitting still long enough to realize there was nowhere else to point the finger. No scapegoat, no convenient villain—just me, the flaws, the quiet hours that made them impossible to ignore. I went through domestic abuse, addiction, toxic relationships that drained me until I had nothing left to defend. I stayed too long. I always stayed too long. But somewhere in the wreckage I learned what boundaries were. I learned how to let go.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a visual creative. People call my style avant-garde, surrealist, the kind of work that bends into dream logic and doesn’t apologize. I write, act, edit, produce. I move between graphic design, marketing, SEO, website development like they’re just extensions of the same muscle. I’m fluent in all the AI platforms and I use them, not as a shortcut but as another brush, another lens. My obsessions are consistent—existential crisis, repression, the grotesque, the sublime. Gothic literature has always felt less like genre and more like scripture, a spiritual framework where decay and beauty coexist.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Bad luck has always been the prelude. A string of small disasters, the kind of events that look like punishment until they turn into something else. My life feels like a reel of unfortunate scenes, stitched together, only to break open into an unexpected glow—an ethereal light at the end of the tunnel. The bad luck isn’t detour; it’s training. It’s what makes the good luck recognizable when it finally arrives.
Pricing:
- Edit – $350+
- Graphic Design – $350+
- Website – $1000+
- Acting – $750+
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleysamia/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-samia-68777894/
- Other: https://www.ridgeproduction.com/
