Winning the narrative battle 🎥, with dream hampton

Winning the narrative battle 🎥, with dream hampton

From WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

December 23, 2025 · 35 min · Season 3 · Episode 13

About this episode

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson interviews dream hampton about embedding climate solutions into popular culture and the power of storytelling.

Hello Earthlings! Welcome back to What If We Get It Right? While you and I know that we already have most of the climate solutions we need — it’s more a matter of how quickly and justly we are going to implement them — most people do not know this. And you kinda can’t blame them because most of the news, plus movies and TV and social media, focus on climate problems . This is a massive storytelling challenge. We have a narrative gap, to put it mildly. And so for this special last episode of the season, I had the pleasure of sitting down with award-winning filmmaker and writer dream hampton in front of an audience at Bowdoin College in mid-November. For her whole career, dream has been making art about power and justice, and more recently has been creating works about climate, which, of course, I’ve been thrilled about. Her credentials are deep , as both community organizer and artist. Recently, she was showrunner and executive producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary series Surviving R. Kelly , which earned her a Peabody Award. In 2019, TIME magazine named dream one of the most influential people in the world, and she’s certainly been influencing my thinking in the decade or so…

People in this episode

Host: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Guest: dream hampton

Topics covered

  • climate solutions
  • storytelling
  • narrative
  • activism
  • popular culture

Keywords

  • climate
  • storytelling
  • activism
  • narrative
  • popular culture
  • dream hampton
  • Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bowdoin College, TIME

Books & works: Surviving R. Kelly

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