Atlanta filmmaker William Feagins Jr. documents Atlanta's Black and brown creative class

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October 16th, 2024

William Feagins Jr. with his 2024 BronzeLens Best Web Series Award for "Our Voices, Our Lives" and the very first BronzeLens Georgia Filmmaker Award (Courtesy of William Feagins Jr.)

Award-winning filmmaker William Feagins Jr. was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has since made his home right here in Atlanta, Georgia.

Feagins love for and connection with Atlanta inspired him to start a series more than six years ago to document the communities that he is most intimately tied into. 

“Our Voices, Our Lives,” hosted on YouTube, chronicles the journeys of Atlanta’s Black and brown entrepreneurial and creative class. The series recently won the Best Web Series Award at Atlanta’s BronzeLens Awards, and Feagins himself was presented with the very first BronzeLens Georgia Filmmaker Award for his achievements in sharing important stories.

“City Lights” producer Jacob Smulian recently chatted with Feagins about his work with Atlanta’s creative class and “Our Voices, Our Lives.”

The series originally started as a pilot for a DC public access cable channel, and while it never ended up making it to air, Feagins continued documenting the journeys of his creative and entrepreneurial peers and posting the results on YouTube.

Six years later, the series has hit its 82nd episode, with no real end in sight. The project has been a labor of love and tenacity for Feagins, who spends his free time recording and editing new episodes.

“I work full time, so I primarily film the interviews on weekends and then I do all the editing after work or on a weekend,” he shared about his dedication to the show.

His introduction to Atlanta’s creative scene came after he moved to the city in 2009, and he explained to Smulian that the first community that he came across in the city was “the spoken word community, [but] all communities have a lot of overlap. So through that, I found a hip hop community, and through that, I found the arts community – because there’s a lot of people who play in all those fields.”

You can find more about Feagins and his incredible work at his website here.

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