CINEASTHESIA
+Film, storytelling, and cultural architecture by Michelle Sam
+A creative practice working across film, immersive experience, habitat design, and regenerative futures. Rooted in the Black diaspora and continental Africa.
About
+The Practice
+
+ Michelle Sam
+Writer · Director · Experience Designer
+Michelle Sam is a writer, award-winning filmmaker, actress, and multimedia artist. Her work explores the intersection of identities and stories in a visceral manner. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants raised in Ireland, she trained at the Gaiety School of Acting before moving to Chicago, where she studied at Second City and turned her talents to filmmaking. She holds a Sociology and Visual and Dramatic Arts degree from Rice University.
+In addition to creating film and TV, she cultivates immersive and interactive experiences and art installations that engage the nine senses through somatic experiencing, across the Black diaspora and in continental Africa under her name, Yaa Tabriwaa. She is a co-founder of Out The Box Creative, a hybrid Ghanaian production company and artist collective based in Accra, Ghana.
+Work
+Projects
+
+ Afrofuturistic Grounded Sci-Fi
+The Last Draw
+With seven days before an unstoppable environmental disaster, world leaders launch a global lottery to decide who escapes to Mars. When the most unlikely members of society and the black sheep of a multigenerational Ghanaian family are selected, they must navigate family fractures, buried truths, and the deeper forces shaping who lives and who's left behind.
+A genre-blending grounded sci-fi with the biting social satire of Parasite, the spiritual unease of The Leftovers, and the gritty immediacy of Children of Men.
+ Explore the Project +
+ Climate Futures · Habitat Design
+Worlding Mim
+A place-based climate futures proposal grounded in film, habitat design, and regenerative land systems in Mim, Ghana. The project asks what becomes visible when future habitation is grounded in land, culture, pressure, and daily life.
+Story, sanctuary, and land come together to create a future that can be inhabited as a narrative, understood as a settlement, and developed as a serious public proposition.
+ Learn More +
+ Immersive Art · Multisensory Experience
+Immersive Experiences
+A mobile immersive art installation that reclaims deliberate joy. Designed to induce happiness and euphoria through film, oral storytelling, sound frequency, bass vibrations, interactive art, cinemagraphs, and scent. Each sensory experience is linked to a story, creating an interconnected larger narrative.
+Travelling directly to working-class neighborhoods across the United States, the Black diaspora, and continental Africa.
+ Discover +Immersive Art
+Joy as Resistance
+A space that reclaims deliberate joy. A mobile immersive art installation comprising various spaces for play, specifically designed to induce joy, happiness, and euphoria by using different sensory and artistic techniques to engage play and psychological inner child work.
+“Black joy is a form of its own resistance to reclaim our humanity in the face of the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery across the diaspora and continental Africa.”
+The experiences specifically trigger the parts of the brain linked to the receptors that induce joy, happiness, and euphoria via film, video, oral storytelling, sound frequency, bass vibrations, an AI mirror that reflects the younger version of self along with affirmations, interactive art revolving around touch, cinemagraphs, and smell. Each experience has its own separate space and is linked to a story, creating an interconnected larger narrative.
+The installation is mobile—built using a 40ft shipping container with wheels, capable of travelling to multiple communities domestically and internationally. It travels directly to working-class neighborhoods across the United States, the Black diaspora, and continental Africa, engaging with different artists in each community.
+This project pushes the bounds of how to tell a story in a multimedia manner, engaging all the senses through psychological and scientific means. It takes the framing device found in literature and turns it on its head, revealing layers of a story similar to a Russian doll across different mediums.
+As a child of Ghanaian immigrants, stories are significant in our culture. Stories can be told through rhythm, visuals, culminating in a cathartic experience. The Black feminism movement—Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Barbara Jordan, Angela Davis—posited that Black joy and self-care is a radical form of resistance. By reclaiming our narratives and deliberate joy, we combat the single story of trauma and pain.
+Sensory Worlds · Photography by Stefanie Schwartz
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ Photography © Stefanie Schwartz
+Climate Futures
+Worlding Mim
+
+ Many climate futures remain hard to connect to because they are detached from the places where life actually happens. This project begins with one specific place and stays with it. It asks what becomes visible when future habitation is grounded in land, culture, pressure, and daily life.
+For this work, that place is Mim, Ghana. Its red earth, water edges, agricultural life, quarry conditions, settlement patterns, and surrounding landforms create a grounded environment for thinking about climate adaptation in material terms.
+
+ Story
+The Last Draw gives the work its emotional life and human stakes. A grounded near-future story about a Ghanaian family living under ecological pressure and lottery-based survival.
+
+ Sanctuary
+Acorus is the habitat system through which this world takes architectural form—spherical, linked, repairable, teachable, and suited to distributed local manufacture.
+
+ Land
+Food production, water catchment, soil repair, medicinal planting, nursery life, shade, and productive edges all shape how people live, move, and remain in place.
+Together, they create a future that can be inhabited as a story, understood as a settlement, and developed as a serious public proposition. The work is ready for a deeper phase of refinement and shared development.
+
+Collaborators
+The Team
+Michelle Sam
+Narrative World
+Writer, award-winning filmmaker, and multimedia artist. Brings the narrative world of The Last Draw and immersive experience design across the Black diaspora and continental Africa. Co-founder of Out The Box Creative in Accra, Ghana.
+George A. Jackson II
+Habitat Systems
+Brings the Acorus habitat system and its architectural logic—spherical, linked, repairable civic sanctuary infrastructure suited to distributed local manufacture and climate-adapted settlement.
+Stefanie Atkinson Schwartz
+Multisensory Experience
+Brings multisensory experience design, embodied perception, and visual storytelling into the worlding process. Her work explores the intersection of nature, sensation, and ecological awareness.
+