Write the Role Only You Can Play: A Self-Made Actor Lab™ Intensive

# ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP

You became an actor to tell stories—not to spend your entire career waiting for someone else to give you permission to tell one.
Self-Made Actor Lab™ is an intimate, hands-on intensive for actors who are ready to stop waiting for the perfect role and begin creating work of their own.
Led by award-winning actress and filmmaker Sakinah Iman, this workshop will help you identify the experiences, perspectives and natural talents that make you uniquely compelling—and begin transforming them into an original cinematic monologue written specifically for you.
This isn't about writing a random scene just so you have something to perform.
Your life is creative material.
Your humor. Your heartbreak. Your culture. Your relationships. Your contradictions. Your career. Your weirdness. Your talents. The things you've survived. The things you can't stop talking about.
Those are often the very things that give an artist a point of view.
Sakinah's own career changed when she stopped waiting for someone to write the perfect role for her and began creating films around her own voice, talents and lived experiences.
Now she'll teach you how to begin doing the same.

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# WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

### 1. Find the Story Only You Can Tell

Through guided exercises, you'll explore your experiences, perspective, personality and natural talents to uncover material that could become compelling original work.
Maybe you're also a dancer, rapper, comedian, athlete, martial artist, musician, parent, chef, poet—or you simply carry a life experience and perspective nobody else can reproduce.
You'll learn to ask:
What makes me interesting before I ever step into character?

### 2. Turn Your Truth Into a Cinematic Monologue

You'll learn how to take raw personal material and begin shaping it into a structured monologue with character, stakes, conflict, specificity and emotional movement.
The goal isn't simply to tell your life story.
It's to transform truth into cinematic storytelling.

### 3. The Art of Believability

A powerful monologue isn't just about the words. It's about whether we believe you.
We'll explore performance choices that can help personal material feel lived rather than recited, including emotional connection, specificity, listening, intention and truthful on-camera behavior.

### 4. Stop Thinking Only Like an Actor. Start Thinking Like a Creator.

What happens when you stop seeing yourself only as the person auditioning for someone else's project?
You'll learn how self-created work can become an artistic and career asset—and how actors can begin thinking like the writers, producers and creative executives of their own material rather than waiting exclusively for auditions.

### 5. Film Festivals: What Happens After You Make the Film?

Creating the work is only part of the journey.
You'll learn the fundamentals of positioning and submitting an independent short film to festivals, including festival fit, submissions, materials and how to begin building a strategic festival plan.
And just as importantly:
What do you do with the film after you've made it?
We'll discuss ways original work can support your reel, artistic brand, online presence and future opportunities.

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# WHAT YOU'LL WALK AWAY WITH

By the end of the intensive, you'll leave with:

• A clearer understanding of your unique artistic point of view
• A personal story or concept selected for development
• The foundation/draft of an original cinematic monologue
• A framework for developing that monologue into a short film
• A beginner-friendly understanding of film festival strategy
• A clearer plan for using self-created work to increase your visibility as an actor

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# LEARN FROM AN ACTOR WHO CHOSE HERSELF

Sakinah Iman is an NYC actress, writer, director and producer with nearly two decades of acting and performance experience and more than a decade of independent filmmaking experience.
After years of working as an actor, Sakinah began creating original vehicles that showcased her own voice and talents rather than waiting for someone else to create those opportunities for her.
Her work has since earned 28 film festival awards, screened at more than 70 film festivals worldwide, and been licensed and distributed on major television and streaming platforms, including Showtime, Paramount+, Hulu, Apple TV and Prime Video.
Her spoken-word short film, He Wants to Know My Number, grew directly from her own voice and lived experience—one example of what can happen when an actor stops asking, “What role will someone give me?” and starts asking:
“What can I create that only I could make?”
But this workshop isn't about teaching you to copy Sakinah's story.
It's about helping you discover yours.

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# WHO THIS IS FOR

This workshop is for the actor who knows they're capable of more than the opportunities they've been given.
The actor who's tired of waiting for the “right” role.
The actor whose current reel doesn't capture the full depth of what they can do.
The multidisciplinary artist who has another gift—music, dance, poetry, comedy, athletics, martial arts, writing or something completely unexpected—and has never considered building original work around it.
And the actor who knows they have something to say but hasn't yet figured out how to turn it into a story.
You don't have to wait for someone else to write the role that finally lets people see you.
You can write it yourself.

This is intentionally a small-group experience so there is room for discussion, writing and individual exploration. Space is limited.