photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: AIR / Sophia Crenna / USA
“I found myself yearning for time away from routine and the familiar landscape of Los Angeles, where locations, objects, and interactions are constantly sparking memories and new ideas that inevitably get jotted down, becoming another note or entry to return to later. I wanted distance from the impulse to continually record and accumulate ideas and instead sit quietly with my experiences and the various seeds of inspiration I’d been assembling.
In the quiet of my studio, pages and pages of writing poured out each day. By arranging my time around writing and allowing everything else to become secondary to that practice, I found myself returning naturally to a flow state each session. Joya: AiR strengthened my trust in the intuitive part of my writing process—those stretches of writing when I become completely absorbed in the work—and reminded me that I can return to that place again.
(But of course, I now have a story about Joya: AiR that I need to write down too.)”
Sophia Crenna
Sophia Crenna is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, working across film, 35mm photography, and prose. If she had to choose one theme to describe her creative interests, she would say her work often centers on people surrounded by traces of the past that remain embedded in contemporary life, where mundane objects, architecture, and landscapes become evidence of what has changed or disappeared. She holds a BFA in Film with a minor in Art History from Pratt Institute, where she graduated with highest honors and received the Outstanding Merit Award.
