Sam Bailey

Sam Bailey, a former student in the Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department’s Acting program, was featured in the Chicago Reader, Chicago’s leading alternative newspaper, in a February 3 article. Headlined “Women of Color Call the Shots in the Chicago-based Webseries Brown Girls,” the story was written by Columbia College Chicago Journalism Department graduate Brianna Wellen ’12, an Associate Editor at the Reader.

Wellen’s story focused on the creation of Brown Girls, a new webseries written by poet Fatimah Asghar and directed by Bailey. The series focuses on the friendship between two young women, a queer South Asian writer and a black musician—a storyline partially based on the real-life relationship between Asghar, 27, and her best friend, musician Jamila Woods, also 27.

“To accurately depict the story, director Sam Bailey assembled a crew of people of color, queer people, and women, some with direct personal connections to Asghar and Woods,” reports the Reader article. “With a crowd-funded budget of $20,000, the team shot the series entirely in Pilsen, highlighting the real places where Asghar and Woods spent their time while living in the neighborhood together. The result is an authentic and funny look at a meaningful friendship between two women. The excitement surrounding the seven-episode season’s debut has generated release parties in at least a dozen cities around the world, including London, New York, and Asghar’s family’s hometown of Lahore, Pakistan.”

Bailey, who knew Asghar from Chicago’s live-lit scene, is quoted by Reader writer Wellen as saying:

Sam Bailey

“I’m really interested in talking about communities of color and queer people and women, but mostly because that’s just my life,” Bailey says. “Normally when you see those people mixed together in a series in media, it doesn’t feel authentic, and I think that’s because when that happens people are trying to check boxes, so these people aren’t fully complex humans. But for me, these are my friends—it’s very obvious to me how they are multilayered, so it’s not hard for me to then put their stories in front of the camera and make it feel palpable and real.”