Today we’d like to introduce you to Tanisha Clay.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story really began long before I ever picked up a camera or stood on a stage. I was a little Black girl who loved She-Ra and believed my grandmother was the baddest woman to ever walk the earth. I grew up loving art, but rarely seeing myself—my skin tone, my kinky hair, my body—in the stories around me. By twelve I wanted straight hair like all the other girls, and by sixteen I had already been told I was “sexy” far more than I had ever been told I was beautiful. Those experiences shaped my purpose long before I had the language for it.
I became a classically trained actress and modern-day griot because I learned early that if I didn’t tell my own story, the world would cast someone taller, thinner, lighter—with curls instead of coils—to play me. So I put myself in the work. I make the art I needed at six, twelve, and sixteen. I make it for the little brown girls today who stand in the mirror trying to shrink or straighten themselves into someone else’s definition of beautiful. I make it for the young men whose ideas of beauty have never included women who look like me. And I make it to model what Black love, tenderness, and healthy touch actually look like—because we deserve to see ourselves in that light.
Artistically, my journey has taken many forms. I studied Theatre Performance and Africana Studies at Western Michigan University, later attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying in their MFA Theatre Performance Program. I’ve spent over a decade performing, directing, and writing—working with Face Off Theatre Company, directing productions like Absentia at Ohio University, and performing in pieces like Yellowman and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My poetry—published in Black Pool of Genius Volumes I & II—and my visual artwork have gone viral on platforms like AfroPunk and For Harriet, allowing me to connect with audiences I once only dreamed of reaching.
Today, I create as a Subversive Black Girl Artist: a storyteller, photographer, poet, actress, filmmaker, educator, and media entrepreneur redefining and re-appropriating “Black Americana.” My visuals seek to highlight the contradictions, pride, tenderness, and resilience within our stories—because in reclaiming them, I continue to reclaim my own.
I now co-lead Black Genius/Black Famous with my husband, George Clay IV, an educational arts company devoted to empowering Black and Brown learners through storytelling, creativity, and cultural strategy. Everything I do—whether it’s directing a play, writing a poem, making a photograph, or teaching—comes from that same griot spirit.
At the end of the day, the art and the artist in me are one. I create to heal myself, and the work speaks to whoever needs it. Somewhere in East St. Louis or Flint, there’s a little girl who needs what I’m serving through my art. That is why I do what I do. That is how I got here. And honestly—this is only the beginning.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
A smooth road? No. My journey has been more like a dirt path carved by women who refused to disappear—beautiful, winding, uneven, and holy.
My struggles began early, with the kind of challenges you can’t always name as a child: learning to love skin the world said was “too dark,” loving hair that was “too coarse,” loving a body that rarely saw itself centered as worthy. Before I ever stepped into a rehearsal room or picked up a camera, I was already fighting invisibility.
And then came the professional challenges—the kind every Black woman artist knows too intimately. Being told to shrink. Being told to soften. Being told my art was “too Black,” my body “too political,” my stories “too heavy.” I have had to work twice as hard for half the visibility, and still push forward as if the doors open automatically for everyone.
There were moments I was so broke I had to choose between creating and surviving. Moments when major opportunities evaporated because someone couldn’t see the value in a dark-skinned woman leading the story. Moments when being a wife, a mother, a daughter, a student, and an artist at the same time felt like spinning fire in my bare hands.
I’ve battled illness, grief, burnout, cultural gatekeeping, colorism, misogynoir, and the loneliness that comes with being “the first” or “the only” in too many rooms.
But here is the truth:
Every struggle sharpened my blessings.
Every “no” taught me to build my own stage.
Every barrier taught me how to light my own path.
The road has not been smooth, but it has been meaningful. And the roughness of that journey is exactly why I create the kind of art I do—art that reminds us that Black women’s magic is not fragile; it is forged.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
At my core, I am a storyteller. A Subversive Black Girl Artist. A modern-day griot using every artistic language available to me—performance, photography, poetry, film, and education—to tell the stories that rarely get centered but absolutely deserve to be seen.
I specialize in narrative reclamation.
Through my photography and visual art, I create images that reimagine and redefine “Black Americana.” My work is known for its tenderness, its sensual honesty, its bold use of the Black body as sacred text, and its refusal to shrink in the face of stereotypes. I use myself intentionally as the subject because my body, my skin, my features, my coils are the very things the world once told me were not enough. I create the images I needed growing up—and the ones young Black girls need now.
I am also a classically trained actress and director, with an MFA in Theatre Performance and over a decade of work on stage. I’ve directed plays, performed nationally, and continue to build character-driven work that explores Black humanity with depth and nuance.
As a poet and author, my books Black Pool of Genius Volumes I & II weave together personal mythology, cultural memory, and spiritual truth. The poems come from the wound and the wonder.
As a media entrepreneur, I co-lead Black Genius/Black Famous with my husband, George Clay IV (DJ Young G), an educational arts company that uses creative tools to empower Black and Brown learners. We merge art, culture, and education to build spaces where our kids—and our grown folks—can see themselves as brilliant.
What I’m Most Proud Of
I am most proud of the ways my work has healed me while healing others.
Of the messages I receive from little brown girls who feel beautiful for the first time.
From grown Black women who say my images helped them reclaim their bodies.
From men who admit they are learning—often for the first time—to expand their definition of beauty and tenderness.
My art is not just aesthetic. It is ancestral. It is restorative. It is liberatory work wrapped in fine art.
What Sets Me Apart
What sets me apart is that I don’t create from the outside looking in—I create from the inside out.
My work is not performative. It’s personal.
Not theoretical. It’s lived.
Not decorative. It’s disruptive.
I bring classical training, cultural memory, spiritual intention, and a refusal to apologize for my Black womanhood into everything I do.
I’m not interested in making “pretty pictures.”
I’m interested in making truth visible.
I’m interested in softening how the world sees Black women—and strengthening how we see ourselves.
I’m interested in telling the stories we were never supposed to forget.
My art is my activism.
My body is my canvas.
My voice is my inheritance.
And my mission is to leave behind a body of work that makes it impossible for the world to pretend it cannot see our beauty, our brilliance, and our complexity.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I don’t really believe in luck—good or bad. I believe in God, divine timing, and purpose. Everything in my life, from the hardest moments to the biggest breakthroughs, has been guided, protected, and aligned in ways that luck could never account for.
There were seasons that felt like “bad luck”: rejection, loss, illness, doors closing right when I thought I was ready. But in hindsight, every one of those seasons was God redirecting me. Preparing me. Refining me. Pushing me into the rooms, roles, and revelations meant specifically for me.
And the things people call “good luck”—the viral moments, the opportunities, the relationships, the visibility—those weren’t coincidences either. Those were prayers answered. Those were seeds I planted years earlier finally blooming. Those were moments where God said, “Now. It’s time.”
As an artist, I see God’s hand most clearly in the way the right people find my work exactly when they need it. The messages I receive from women and girls who say my art helped them heal, or see themselves differently—that’s not luck. That’s assignment. That’s purpose meeting its moment.
In my business, I’ve learned that when I try to force things, they fall apart. But when I move with faith and obedience, the path clears in ways I could never orchestrate on my own. God has been the architect behind every closed door that protected me and every open door that elevated me.
So no—luck hasn’t shaped my journey.
God has.
And I am where I am today because of grace, alignment, hard work, and a calling that refuses to let me quit.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bookedin.com/book/blackgeniusblackfamous/services
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackgeniusblackfamous
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/15vEiFcwuy/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@blackgeniusblackfamous
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/tanishalynnprettyfire
