These five Fordham grads have turned their creative passions into their businesses.
“Artists are entrepreneurs. We are our own business.” That’s what Fordham Theatre grad Marjuan Canady, FCLC ’08, says when she teaches creative entrepreneurship at places like Georgetown University and NYU. Her words ring true for many Fordham alumni who have cut a professional path with their arts and business acumen.
“There’s creativity in everything that is going on in the room, whether it’s the business side or the actual creative side,” said Canady, who founded Sepia Works, a multimedia production company, and Canady Foundation for the Arts, a nonprofit that creates educational and career opportunities for youth of color by connecting them with professional artists. “That’s what makes it fun.”
SaVonne Anderson, FCLC ’17
Founder and Creative Director, Aya Paper Co.
After graduating from Fordham in 2017 with a degree in new media and digital design, SaVonne Anderson worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she had interned as a student. Being around inspiring art got her gears turning, and she decided to start her own greeting card and stationery business, Aya Paper Co., in 2019. The following year, she decided to focus on Aya full time. Since then, her work has been featured in Time, Allure, and Forbes magazines, and carried in stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Whole Foods. And while it can be difficult to balance her design and illustration work with the demands of running a business and the challenges of parenting a toddler, Anderson feels it’s all worth it.
I had always loved greeting cards, but I struggled to find ones that really resonated with me—not finding a Father’s Day card for my dad because they didn’t have any images that looked like him, or looking for a birthday card for one of my friends but not finding any that had the right sentiment. It made me feel like, ‘Okay, somebody needs to solve this.’ And then I realized that person could be me.”
SaVonne Anderson
Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05
Artist and Designer
Like many textile artists, Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05, was greatly influenced by the Gee’s Bend collective, a group of African American quilters whose work she first saw at the Whitney Museum as a Fordham student. “It ignited a desire to explore color and shape and rhythm,” she says. More than 20 years later, Clippinger has made a career out of that artistic exploration, displaying her work in museums, galleries, and corporate collections, and selling bags, rugs, and tablet covers on her website. Some of those items are woven by her professional partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she spent time on a Fulbright-Garcia Robles grant in 2013.
The time in Mexico really shifted my work in a variety of ways. I went from being focused on just painting and sculpture and these wall objects to working more in a craft realm. My partners there and I have stayed really close. When COVID hit, it dried up their business. And so that inspired me to create the online shop.”
Martha Clippinger
Katte Geneta, FCLC ’06
Founder, Narra Studio
Katte Geneta grew up thinking she was going to become a doctor. But when she arrived at Fordham and took a fine arts class, she discovered a talent for drawing. After graduating in 2006, she exhibited her paintings and later pursued a master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard. Soon, she took up weaving—the smell of oil paint made her nauseous while she was pregnant. Motivated by a conversation with a weaver in the Philippines who was hoping to find broader exposure, she started Narra Studio. The studio sometimes designs goods and sometimes just works on distribution. It partners with upward of 15 weaving communities in the Philippines and sells the pieces—from jewelry and blankets to jackets and traditional barong tops—through its website and at markets.
I have had such a wonderful response from people who feel that this has been very empowering for them—to wear something from their homeland. A lot of people email us and say, ‘My family is from this part of the Philippines, can you help me connect to weavers from that place?’ Being able to do that is really important. People feel that connection to their homeland through what we do.”
Katte Geneta
Bryan Master, FCRH ’99
Composer; Founder and Executive Producer, Sound + Fission and Partner in Crime Entertainment
Bryan Master has been writing and playing music for as long as he can remember—he apologizes to any Fordham neighbors who may have heard his frequent drumming at Rose Hill. But when he graduated in 1999 with a degree in communications, his passion took a backseat to his job in advertising—until 2022. That’s when his side hustle—a music, production, and creative services company called Sound + Fission—became a sustainable, full-time endeavor, thanks, he says, to a boom in audio storytelling listenership. Along with his other company, Partner in Crime, which focuses on creating and developing series, Sound + Fission was behind Can You Dig It?, an original Audible series about the birth of hip-hop that featured narration from Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
I was side hustling for two decades to try and figure out a path in a very challenging industry and marketplace, a path to being a creative professional. And I just doubled down and I said, ‘I want my second act to look different. I want to enjoy what I do. I want to really cash in on my investment and do what I think I was meant to do.’”
Bryan Master
Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16
Co-Founder and Director, ArtSea
Courtney Celeste Spears had achieved many of her dreams as a dancer: She began dancing with Ailey II—Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s second company—while she was still a student in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program, and she joined the main company in 2018, two years after graduating. Last summer, though, she made the leap to devote herself full time to ArtSea, a Bahamas-based arts organization she founded with her brother, Asa Carey, in 2017. Now living on the island, where she spent time visiting family as a child, Spears works to bring high-level dance education and entertainment to the Caribbean and expose young artists to the wider dance world.
I am so passionate about dancers expanding their minds and horizons to realize our worth and how brilliant we are,” she says, “and I’m so grateful that I’d never smothered that seed of wanting to do more and wanting to own my own business. I realized I could take all that I had learned and really put it back somewhere. That’s the purpose of why I’m a dancer: to effect change and to reach people.”
Courtney Celeste Spears
