Wade McCollum and Sarah Small’s creative confluence emerged in 2016 during HERE Arts Center’s PROTOTYPE Festival wherein they co-directed a staged work of Small’s once-was-stand-alone musical album, Secondary Dominance.
In other words, this film was crafted somewhat backwards, as the soundtrack came first and the script came last. Following the staged work, they directed a series of music videos of the material, after which they created an album-length music video. It was at this point that they realized they’d unearthed the opportunity to create a feature film, wherein a script and structure could scaffold the music and imagery to express more didactically, with the goal of making the themes explored accessible to a wider audience, and in turn be of service.
Coming from substantively different artistic backgrounds, Small from the Fine Arts and music and McCollum from Broadway and neuroscience, their creative disciplines overlap and range from writing, directing, and performing; to composing and singing; to editing and directing photography.
What brings Small & McCollum together is the mutual thrill they share uncovering symbolic and poetic potentialities in search of adventurous storytelling opportunities; the natural momentum generated while disassembling and reassembling elements — the way chemists do with molecules. They have fun imagining this as the Science of Curiosity and thus have branded their forthcoming directorial and producorial company Curiostronomy Pictures.
Composer and singer on Yo-Yo Ma's GRAMMY-winning "Best World Music Album” (2016) and protagonist in Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch (The New Yorker’s “10 Best Movies of 2014"), Small is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, performer, photographer, and filmmaker.
Born in 1979 in Washington D.C. into a family of writers, psychoanalysts, a lutenist / composer mother, and pianist / composer father, Small spent her childhood playing cello, concocting gibberish languages, dancing, and performing in musicals written by her mother. She became enraptured by photography when she was 13 yo, and in 2001 graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BA in photography. She moved to Brooklyn the day before September 11th.
In 2006, Small co-founded Balkan vocal trio, Black Sea Hotel, described by NPR as an ensemble that “hits with the magnetic pull of rock-bound sirens”. In 2011, noted by The New York Times as “seem(ing) like a miracle”, Small curated an 120-participant Tableau Vivant (“living picture”) of her photographic series, The Delirium Constructions, which has been exhibited on six continents. In 2017, Small was commissioned by PROTOTYPE Festival to premiere a staged work of Secondary Dominance which interwove electronic, Balkan folk, industrial, pop, punk, rap, rock, and classical music. Small’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, NPR, WNYC, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Life Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
Small is currently writing a chamber work for piccolo, flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, violoncello, and clicky mouth sounds entitled “Behind the Gymnasium”. Small lives in a pink house on a tree-lined street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She spends as much time as she can dancing Waltz, Tango, Rumba, and Foxtrot.
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Noted by the LA Times as “a force of nature… spontaneous, complex, and dangerous”, Wade McCollum is a Broadway actor, filmmaker, singer, composer, writer, and director. Wade is also a student in neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania, and co-founder of two Cornell-backed neuroscience tech companies.
McCollum was born into a nomadic family, where rock + roll was their sustenance, and a sparkly green 1978 Dodge van their home. The experience of daily environmental changes while journeying town-to-town primed McCollum for a life of continuous reorientation and creative exploration.
McCollum has starred in Broadway productions including Water for Elephants and Wicked, as well as It Happened in Key West in London’s West End. He has garnered numerous awards and nominations including a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Ernest Shackleton in the Off-Broadway production of Ernest Shackleton Loves Me for which he received the Norton Award for Best Actor. He co-created and starred in the hit solo show Make Me Gorgeous and was nominated for both the Lucille Lortel Award and the Drama Desk Award and won the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Solo Performance. Other awards include both the Los Angeles Outer Critic’s Circle Award and the Back Stage Garland Award for Best Actor in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as well as Dallas Fort Worth Theatre Critic’s Forum Award for Best Actor as the Emcee in Cabaret. He has starred in Broadway tours including Lincoln Center Theatre’s My Fair Lady, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Jersey Boys. Television credits include "FBI: Most Wanted," "Madame Secretary," "Prodigal Son," "At Home With Amy Sedaris," “Nightcap," "The Knick," "Submissions Only,” and the 2024 Tony Awards for the Multi Tony Award nominated Water for Elephants.
Wade is currently pursuing a self-designed degree at University of Pennsylvania in the neuroscience of narrative investigating how we have evolved to metabolize stories from a neurobiological perspective. Analyzing narrative structure, behavioral endocrinology, ethology, myth and music culminating in a dissertation entitled: “Olympians of the Heart” codifying the complex augmented brain regions of professional actors. The hypothesis is: Like olympians, actors are emotional athletes. What can they teach non-actors about emotional resilience, cognitive flexibility, and code shifting?
Be it in theater, on screen, in boardrooms, classrooms, or laboratories, McCollum’s life breath is one wherein art and science intersect.