About Milton Woods

I’m a person of boundaries; never quite being fully defined as one thing or the other. Like water, ever changing, maintaining my essential nature, but changing in form.

I went to an all-black K-8th school and was surrounded with the black and brown faces like mine. This cultivated an understanding of the richness for my culture as well as my family heritage. However, even at this young age I knew that there was more than this; more places beyond my African-American dominated south side of Chicago. At this time I can remember spending time with my father as we would go every weekend to a new place downtown. I loved these outings as I was able to see the city from a broader lens, and the different people that inhabited it. During long train rides my dad would describe to me the different types of people that lived in various neighbourhoods as Chicago even to this day is still segregated. I was overcome with a desire to explore these horizons. Up until high school I hadn’t had a legitimate friend that didn’t share the same skin tone as mine. Of course I had interacted with people of different races, but never a true friend, not enough to know them.

On the days when my father and I didn’t go exploring we stayed in the house and pursued our favourite pastime; watching movies. My father showed me many films that perhaps weren’t appropriate for my age, but they gave me insight into the world of adults, yet other another boundary. Me as a child wanting to be an adult, me as a child wanting to feel what others felt I wasn’t old enough to feel yet. The first movie that I cried at was Castaway; I was seven. Many times I took things a step further and implored my dad to pretend with me in my own made up world. After watching a good movie I would continue the journey of the characters in my head as my father and I acted out what we thought what the next endeavour of the character should be. I felt this desire to play the characters that were the most unlike me. The difference present in these characters was attractive to me as to balance my own essence within very different character from my own was therapeutic in that in revealed to me the various qualities that could occupy one body. As water is, a person can be good and gracious as well as volatile and violent; exploring this multifaceted approach to the human condition interested me.

Upon entering Whitney Young High School I finally was presented with the opportunity to branch out and experience a more diverse group of people. In high school the demographics were 30% white, 30% black, 30% Hispanic, and 10% Asian. It was a selective enrollment magnet school so the student body was also diverse in terms of socioeconomic status as intelligence and work ethic was the only prerequisite. I was an athlete, and had a love for art and theatre. I even found it difficult to define and categorize myself, and it was difficult for my peers to peg me down. Like water my ability to occupy different shapes and vessels was empowering to me.

Coming from an all-black elementary school to one of the most diverse high schools in the country, to Baldwin Wallace a predominately white University presents its challenges and opportunities. Yet, I have loved the opportunity of exploring new perspectives. Coming from a predominately liberal multiracial and multicultural city in Chicago to a conservative homogenous suburb forced me to adjust. I have friends and interact with people that are viewed as popular while also having friend that some would views as strange or weird. In connecting with different people like water I have to change, bend, stretch, and traverse different avenues and containers as I choose to take whatever form necessary for a healthy and positive connection with a person.  To remain static in structure is what I am not and is this free flowing quality that allows me to seep and permeate these boundaries and differences that may seem stark at first.

Boundaries and differences is a concept that threads throughout my work for example, I recently did a short film about the struggle of a heroin addict; the point of this film was show the plight that an addict goes though in that moment of needing a high. While this character may be unlike the audience, as he is experiencing the disease of addiction, my goal is to create empathy towards this deeply flawed character. In another work that I directed I show the struggle of a woman that is suffering from domestic violence; my goal in this was to present her simply as a human. Although it may be easy for an audience to distant themselves from her struggle as they may not have experience her struggle, I am concerned with showing characters that are relatable, multifaceted, and pull on the universal emotions and feelings that everyone can connect with. I do not be spoon fed an idea or preach but tell stories to connect audiences to those who are different then they are. I want my films to reveal more about one’s own self by connecting them to perspectives they otherwise would have disregarded or found themselves to be un-connectable with. In my work the audience is the water and my goal is to allow themselves to occupy a different vessel that will reveal a truth to them about the world and about themselves.