Although she’s a celebrated ballerina with years of professional experience already behind her, Ashley Murphy is beginning her first season as a dancer at the Washington Ballet learning the very basics: “This is my first Nutcracker season,” she admits. At Dance Theatre of Harlem, where she danced for 13 years before coming to D.C., she would have Sugar Plum season off. This winter, she’s making her holiday appearance on the stage as the Snow Queen, but she’s even more excited about some of the other performances that lie ahead.—Emily Q. Hazzard

How did you start dancing?

I grew up in Shreveport, La., and I started dancing when I was three years old. My mom was tired of me jumping on her furniture and flipping off her couch, so she actually put me in gymnastics. In order to take gymnastics you had to take ballet class as well to learn to point and for flexibility.

What made you decide to come to Washington Ballet from Dance Theatre of Harlem?

I’d heard many great things about Washington Ballet’s artistic director [Septime Webre], and I wanted an opportunity to try new choreography and do some full-length ballets, which we didn’t do at Dance Theatre of Harlem because it’s a smaller company. So I was excited about that and being able to perform at the Kennedy Center.

What’s different about the choreography?

[Dance Theatre of Harlem] is a neoclassical company. At Washington Ballet, there’s a little bit more of a range of ballets—from classical [works] such as Swan Lake and Giselle all the way to stuff like In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated by William Forsythe. So I was excited about the prospect of being able to do just a little bit of a larger range of dances.

One of the pieces I’m really looking forward to learning is Trey McIntyre’s Mercury Half-Life [as well as] Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. I’m also very excited about learning a lot more of the Septime Webre ballets just because he’s so innovative and creative in what he comes up with. And just being able to do Theme and Variations. The rep for this year is going to be really awesome.

Last year, you did a Verizon commercial. That’s kind of unusual [for a ballet dancer].

It was actually really amazing. I think right now ballet is going a little bit more mainstream because of Misty Copeland and all the other great ballerinas who are getting the face of ballet out there to the world. People are becoming a lot more appreciative of the arts, especially ballet. I did the commercial and it actually aired during the Super Bowl, which was interesting. People were saying “I was watching the Super Bowl and I saw you on TV!” whereas they never would have paid attention before. I think the ballet companies are doing a really great job now of making ballet mainstream.

Do you think a lot of that has to do with Misty Copeland’s celebrity?

Her name being almost a household name is almost unheard of for ballet dancers. The ballet world is actually very small—everybody knows just about everybody else, but to have your name be a household name for people who have no idea about dance or ballet at all is a phenomenon.

Do you think Misty’s superstar status has changed anything for you, especially as a dancer of color?

As great as Misty Copeland has been, there are a lot of dancers who came before us even that paved the way, like Lauren Anderson and so many others, even the dancers at Dance Theatre of Harlem when they opened in 1969. Virginia Johnson and Christina Johnson and Judy Tyrus—there are so many beautiful African-American ballerinas that opened [doors] and paved the way for Misty Copeland to have a name. She’s carrying on the legacy, which is great, but you can’t forget about those others who paved the way even before her.

Veronica O. Davis looks out the window of a coffee shop and declares, with a smile, “Oh, there goes one of my projects!” She’s talking about a bus ad for Vision Zero, a traffic-safety initiative spearheaded by the District Department of Transportation, for which Davis consults. The ad’s branding is a key to how Davis, the cofounder of consulting firm Nspiregreen, thinks about D.C.: as an urban center where people get around in different yet coexisting ways. An avid cyclist herself, Davis also co-founded Black Women Bike in 2011. —Andrew Giambrone

What’s it been like working with a District agency, especially surrounding issues of transportation?

It’s actually pretty exciting. One, I love transportation… Part of what’s exciting for me about what we’re doing locally is really being able to provide access to people. I think that we have experienced a lot of growth in this city but there’s still a lot of challenges. Transportation is a way to provide social services to people. We can say, “Oh, someone needs to get a job,” but how can they get there? People need to go to school, but can kids get there? Our right of way is our right of way. How do we move the most people the most efficiently?

So when you say “access,” what’s your framework or way of thinking about that?

I used to live in Ward 7, and one of the challenges in terms of access was: I could get on a bus in my old neighborhood of Fairfax Village and get downtown, to a Metro station, but I couldn’t even get to a grocery store a mile away, because there’s no way for me to get there, no bus that took me there. I had friends that also lived in Ward 7, and I couldn’t even go visit them unless I had a car. That’s frustrating. The old model for how the city was created was about getting people downtown and getting people back home, but I think as there’s new developments and new energies that are happening outside the core city, then I think you need to figure out how you get people to those new energies.

I can see where people who have been here for the long haul aren’t also able to benefit in this new prosperity. It’s hard to look at. When you look at Navy Yard—which is where I live now—a lot of that was public housing, strip clubs. And it’s gone. It’s kind of challenging because we invested in a ball field, and what’s the next step? I think the rub for me—and I think it’s the rub for most black urban planners, even just planners of color—it’s that you believe in these models, because you do think there should be density, so therefore it could make things affordable, and we do think there should be restaurants, and all those are good things. But at what cost do those things come? You become a little protective of communities in the sense that I feel like there’s something missing… Where’s the flavor?

Is that the biggest social issue to you in D.C.—equality of access and opportunity?

Yes. I hate the word “gentrification.” Anyone who’s ever seen me tweet knows that it makes me want to rip the paint off the wall. The beef I have with it is I think people are overusing the word and not using it in the proper context. It’s so nuanced, and you really have to look neighborhood-by-neighborhood. It’s almost like a red herring. When we focus on the theme of “the city’s losing Chocolate City,” it prevents us from getting dirty and saying, what is the issue? Why isn’t everyone coming along? And let’s solve it.

You have to tie your interests back to the interests of the community, and when you’re not doing that you end up with these rubs. As an example: You might want a bike lane. And that’s fine. I think it’s very important to have bike lanes. But how does that tie back into the needs of the community? So maybe that community is having challenges with crime. So bike lanes can bring more people, which brings more eyes on the street. Maybe that community is having challenges with people driving too fast. OK, well a bike lane can narrow the roadway, narrow the lane widths, which will slow down the cars—by design.

Do you think there should be more bike lanes in places like Ward 7 and Ward 8?

I think there are areas where there could be more bike infrastructure in Ward 7 and Ward 8, and I will never say no to more bike lanes. I can also say as someone who’s biked very much around Ward 7 and Ward 8: There’s other challenges that need to be considered. The topography is something that just really needs to be considered. I consider myself of pretty good health, but there’s some days where I’m like, I can’t do it; I’m just going to put my bike on the front of the bus. I can also say that the road network [in those wards] creates challenges, and that’s even just by car.

Five years ago, D.C.-made booze didn’t even exist. Now local gin, vodka, and other spirits are available at nearly every bar, thanks in large part to New Columbia Distillers’ son-and-father-in-law team, John Uselton and Michael Lowe. When they began producing Green Hat Gin in 2012, they became the city’s first commercial distillers in about a century, paving the way for the city’s thriving cocktail landscape. —Jessica Sidman

Is D.C. more of a gin town or a whiskey town?

ML: Most towns are more whiskey towns than gin towns. People drink more whiskey. Whiskey’s got a deeper American tradition. Gin’s growing everywhere, and I hope we’re making D.C. more of a gin town.

New Columbia is the first [legal] distillery in D.C. since before Prohibition. What took so long?

ML: Before Prohibition, there were a few small distilleries in and around Washington, and there were a couple of big ones in Baltimore. And then Prohibition just wiped all of them out. The industry just kind of moved out of this region. It wasn’t until the 1980s that anyone started doing little distilleries.

JU: The equipment’s big. It’s long term leases. You’re not moving. So you have to commit yourself: I am staying in D.C. for the rest of my life basically or until further notice. And I think that you had a lot of people who just weren’t thinking that they were going to stay in D.C. As you get people who are making things and really establishing D.C. as a place that can make things, it encourages other people.

What was the biggest challenge being the first?

JU: We’re experiencing it now. When we opened, we couldn’t sell a bottle from here. We couldn’t taste somebody on gin. We could run a factory and we could self-distribute—and that’s all we could do. We were pushing for legislation while we were opening so that we could do tastes [on-site]. You go to other distilleries and they’ve got tasting rooms half the size of our distillery. Well, if we knew about all this kind of stuff, we would have probably gotten a space a little bit bigger.

It seems like distillery pubs are on the brink of blowing up in D.C. What do you see as the future of distilling in D.C.?

ML: There are right now under construction or in operation six legitimate [production] distilleries in D.C… I would expect in three years, four years, we’ve got ten distilleries in D.C. plus however many distillery pubs. It’s not wild compared to some other cities. Seattle has 40.

You have also been pioneers in the revitalization of Ivy City. Where do you see this neighborhood in five to ten years?

ML: Very different. Ivy City was sort of a forgotten little corner. But now it’s sort of a distilling destination. There are a lot of people here on Saturdays when it’s nice weather wandering the streets. The Hecht Company [Warehouse development] is going to be a big draw, all the retail they’re putting in there.

Is this the next 14th Street? Could it be?

JU: Wow, no.

ML: It’s just physically not big enough. I would think it’s more like the Brookland neighborhood.

Most people at the end of day, they go home, they have a drink. Do you guys still do that? What is your cocktail of choice?

JU: I’ve been making a lot of negronis… You know, I was a beer buyer for years, so I still drink beer.

ML: If I want to [drink like it’s the] ’60s, I’ll still make a martini maybe once a week or so. For that I use our original Green Hat because of the herbal notes with Capitoline Vermouth. If you do a fairly high vermouth ratio, it makes a nice, soft, approachable martini with lots of herbal stuff going on.

As the new president of the University of the District of Columbia, Ronald Mason Jr. faces a struggling school with budget woes and political problems. —Will Sommer

What are your plans for UDC?

In a nutshell, we want to establish it as an advanced public system of higher learning that serves the community of the District of Columbia. What does that mean? It means that we produce the workforce for the District, from District residents, and we can do it in various different ways.

You had ambitious plans at Southern University, but ran into some roadblocks. [In 2014, Mason left the position of president at Southern University in Louisiana after the board refused to agree to his ambitious demands for spending cuts.] What have you learned from that?

I learned a good bit. One, there’s some battles you can’t win no matter how hard you try. I was hired at Southern. They came looking for me to fix the problems. The politics, which was one of the problems, wouldn’t allow that to happen.

Given UDC’s troubles and what have you, critics say, “Just stick with the community college, make UDC a trade school, get rid of the bachelor programs.” You would disagree with that, and I’d be curious for your argument in favor.

One, every person should have the chance to achieve their highest potential. And as the public system of higher learning for the District, that would be our job, to enable them to do that.

I’ve been told that 70 percent of the jobs that are available in the District, people who are residents of the District or born in the District aren’t eligible for those jobs. So it’s about enabling as much human potential as possible to be available for the workforce in the District. And of course you know that many of the students coming out of the public school system are under-prepared, mostly [students] of color, right?

What do you think is the biggest problem you’re facing at UDC?

I have six pages of lists.

Go for a couple.

It’s hard to say the biggest. I’ve been meeting with the elected leaders here, and the business community, and one of the messages I’ve been trying to convey is that we need some space, some time be able to fix the things that need to be fixed.

There’s a history there, there’s a distrust of the institution—brand issues. But it’s all doable as long as people give us the space to do it.

It seems like a lot of the job is making people believe in UDC.

I’ve been told that people don’t believe it can be fixed. When some of those people say it—they’re in a position to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? But I think that timing, as much as anything, is a factor in these outcomes. And I get a real sense that people want UDC to succeed. I get a real sense that the stars are in place to make it happen.

And without getting too spiritual, I think I’m where I’m supposed to be, when I’m supposed to be there, which is at UDC.

In between winning gold medals and WNBA championships, Kara Lawson thought she would end up as a lawyer. In fact, because the league paid for graduate school, the Springfield native planned to shuttle between a few years of playing overseas and summers in the U.S. playing pro ball before hitting the books. Then, eight years ago, ESPN called and asked her to do some college basketball work. She got hooked. Now, Lawson is one of the few broadcasters who works both women’s and men’s college hoops games. Last year, after signing with the Mystics, she came back to D.C. —Steve Cavendish

You’ve had the chance to play at home the last couple of years for the first time since high school. Enjoy it?

It definitely is enjoyable, because I’ve had a chance to see my parents more frequently than at any point in my career, because when you’re a pro athlete, you live a nomadic existence. Most of my fellow players go overseas and play, and even though I don’t, I still live that life because I’m working for ESPN.

Where do you have roots these days? Because as soon as the WNBA season is over, you’re into pre-production for the college basketball season.

My first work is covering Kentucky’s Midnight Madness in Lexington. Most of October, for me, is spent preparing for the season, going to practices, observing players, trying to get a feel for as many teams as possible, both men and women. There’s a lot of freshmen on every team that I’ve never seen play because I’m not a college recruiting guru. A lot of times, if it’s a highly touted player or someone who’s going to play a key role on a contending team, I try to get a look at them. On the men’s side, the roster turnover is much more severe than it is on the women’s side because of the ability to leave early. There’s 300 some-odd Division 1 teams. Now, I’m obviously not going to cover all of them, but when you factor in the NCAA tournament, times two, that’s a lot of information. [Laughs]

You’ve played 12 seasons and spoken fondly of playing with the Mystics. Do you have a 13th in you?

I usually start training heavy in January. You don’t know how your body is going to respond and you don’t know if you’re going to want to climb that mountain again, mentally, because it’s a three to four month process to get yourself fit. I still enjoy playing. It’s been a huge challenge to do both, but I view them as helping one another. Playing helps me as a broadcaster. It’s like a basketball lab, and there’s strategy involved. All of those things that you kind of talk through as an analyst on television, you’re putting them into action as a player. That’s really unique. Nobody else in the business really has that, except for a couple of analysts who still coach. For me, that’s really powerful and colors my broadcasting. I love that interplay between them.

Did you always want to be on TV?

I wasn’t interested in broadcasting at all. In fact, I was so afraid of public speaking as an undergrad at Tennessee, [head coach] Pat Summitt made me take a public speaking course. I would get so nervous. My teammates that were there when I was a young player laugh whenever they see me on television now because they remember how fearful I was.

What do you think of the Mystics getting their own facility?

I think it’s going to be great, because what you want is for players to have a place that they can go at any hour and have a chance to get their work in, whether it’s extra shooting or lifting, and that’s not currently the case at Verizon. It’s hard if you want to go in early and get extra shots or stay late and get extra shots. That building is being used all the time, so that’s not an ideal professional environment to be in because you’re limited by the calendar. You’re constantly getting put out of your locker room for stuff that’s going into the arena. I think it’s going to be good to have everything under one roof.

What do you think about the location, in a former mental institution?

I can’t say that I’ve spent much time there. [Laughs] I’ve heard it’s not a great area, that it needs a lot of work. But anybody that’s from D.C. will know that they’ve said that about a lot of places, like where Nats Park is now. The size of the arena is going to be beneficial and it could really create a good home court environment.

In 2013, six scientists—all of them unusually small—donned headlamps, helmets, and cavers’ canvas overalls to maneuver themselves into a deep, barely reachable chamber of a South African cave. At one point, the team says, researchers wedged themselves through a passage less than eight inches wide. They were in pursuit of a cache of hominid bones that appeared in photographs other cavers had taken in the Rising Star Cave. They expected to find a partial skeleton belonging, they hoped, to of one of mankind’s early ancestors. But down in the cave, the group found their bone count didn’t add up.“When you find you have three right femurs, for example, you suddenly know you’re dealing with more than one individual.” The complete discovery would include at least 15 individual specimens from a range of ages, and once they were cleaned, recorded, catalogued, and analyzed, the evidence pointed to a brand-new species: Homo naledi. Among those six cavers was Becca Peixotto, an American University PhD student and archaeologist. She’s used her experience on the Rising Star team to advocate for gender diversity in science and open sharing of research in her discipline. —Emily Q. Hazzard

Were you an outdoorsman before you were a scientist?

Absolutely. I worked for many years doing outdoor experiential education, leading wilderness expeditions—climbing, backpacking, mountaineering, and that kind of stuff. And when I came back to school, I came back to grad school to study archaeology. All of those different things I’d done in the past came together to help me do field archaeology.

What’s a typical day like in the field?

It’s so different depending on the field type. In general, we’re up pretty early, there’s some sort of a meeting at the beginning of the day, and then everybody hits the field. Then you spend quite a bit of time digging things up. Some pretty quick lab work happens, because it’s not just about digging these things up out of the ground, it’s about studying them and figuring out what we can learn about them—what it looks like when it’s in the ground, what’s nearby, what else we’re finding. In the [Rising Star] cave, for example, we use a 3-D scanner. Sometimes we use survey techniques to record where artifacts come from… Because of course in archaeology, you spend, I don’t know, ten percent of your time in the field and the rest of the time is in the lab. It’s so much more [work] to study the stuff than it is just to get it out of the ground.

There’s a lot of publicity for Rising Star, plus the fact that all the excavators are women. Has this opened new doors to talk to girls about involvement in science?

Even when we were doing the first round of excavations back in November 2013, and we were tweeting and blogging and Skyping [about it], the fact that we were all women was something that people were excited about—having women doing not just lab science but the adventure side of science and being able to speak to middle school and high school girls about “Look, this is a possibility and an option [for you].”

Did you know before you went into the Rising Star site that you would be pulling out a new species?

No. We went in thinking that we were going to recover one partial skeleton of a species that had already been described… It started to become clear that we were looking at something that was not what we expected to find.

That must have been so exciting.

It was very exciting! It’s a new species and the science itself is really amazing, but I think [it’s also exciting] the way that the science is being shared and made accessible not just to other researchers but to, for example, schoolteachers who want to teach this stuff. We’re doing this project, Open Access, which [makes] the scientific articles available for anyone to download and read—you don’t have to pay for them or go to an institution to be able to get access to them. And then the 3-D scans of the fossils are available online for anybody to look at and download. [Educators] can download and print their own copies of the fossils for their classrooms, or people who are teaching more advanced science can download the articles for their students to read. And I think that’s lifting the veil of how science works. That’s something I hope to be able to do with the other kinds of archaeology that I’m doing.

Is that a trend in other disciplines as well?

There’s starting to be more and more open access in other kinds of science as well, but it’s still considered pretty new at this point. It’s not the norm. I think one of the hopes of the way that Rising Star is happening is that this may become more and more the norm—that the next discoveries and the next research that happens in paleoanthropology will also make all this data available to make it easier for researchers to compare information and for more people to be engaged in the process.

If you’ve spent any time following the D.C. punk scene in the past two decades, you know Mary Timony. Since her newest band, the garage-punk trio Ex Hex, formed in 2013, the D.C. native has spent the better part of two years on the road—playing everywhere from the inaugural Landmark Festival to venues throughout Europe. Still, no matter how long she’s gone or how far she travels, she always gravitates back to her hometown. —Matt Cohen

You’ve seen the D.C. music scene change and evolve over the years. Many think it’s going through another renaissance—more D.C.-area bands are making splashes nationally. Why do you think the music scene is cyclical like that?

There’s some really cool kids playing bands today. A lot of younger people. It did kind of go through a transition period, but I think it seems that people are attracted to D.C. again. Kids that grew up here are staying here. When I was not here in the ’90s, there were a lot of musicians moving to town to be a part of the scene. That’s not really happening a lot now. I feel like it’s more that the people who grew up here don’t want to leave, and that’s kind of how it was in the ’80s, too, in the punk/hardcore scene. It’s kind of a return to that.

You toured with Speedy Ortiz last year, who recently started an in-show hotline for victims of harassment. Harassment at shows is becoming an increasing problem but not everyone is aware of it. Have you encountered issues like this a lot over the years?

Not really. I’m not in my twenties anymore. I think it’s kind of a generational thing, if I were in my twenties again, I think I’d be really involved in that. I think it’s pretty cool that Sadie [of Speedy Ortiz] is doing that.

I grew up being really interested in going to rock shows as a place to get away from anything awful in my life and always found that shows were a safe place to escape to. But it’s a new culture of show attendees, I guess. Especially growing up in D.C., that kind of shit would never happen.

Yeah, I imagine it’s a bigger problem at shows [where people are dancing and grinding] than punk shows in D.C.

Oh yeah, definitely. I think things are changing a lot. I feel like in the ’90s, things were just more isolated. Music fans were all—a lot of times you felt like it was all of your friends. You found out about this music on your own and then when you went to shows, that’s how you made friends. Now with the Internet, I feel like crowds at shows are more of a random section of society that just found out about new music on Pitchfork or something.

One of my favorite interviews with you I’ve ever read is the one you did with the A.V. Club about how much you hate the song “Your Body is a Wonderland,” so I’ve got to ask, is there another song you absolutely loathe and why?

Yeah, sure. [Laughs]

What is it?

[Hesitates] I don’t know. I don’t want to share. It’s mean.

It probably won’t go to print.

OK, OK. I teach guitar—I don’t teach it that much right now, but I had to teach a few songs that, when I first started teaching I was like “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this,” but then I found that I could just get through the song and it wasn’t an issue, but I had to teach this one kid that song.

Tucked away in the basement of a nondescript Columbia Heights house, some of the most exciting music in years has been recorded at Swim-Two-Birds, the home studio of spouses Hugh McElroy and Kevin Erickson. From Priests to the Cornel West Theory to Hemlines, Swim-Two-Birds has become synonymous with a certain sound among D.C.’s musical contingent. That’s mostly due to the studio’s all-analog setup—rare in today’s digitally obsessed culture—but also because of who Hugh and Kevin are: deeply passionate music nerds. Hugh—a D.C. native—has been a part of the local punk scene for years, playing in experimental post-hardcore band Black Eyes in early aughts, while Kevin works full-time advocating for artist’s rights with the Future of Music Coalition. —Matt Cohen

When did you first start Swim-Two-Birds? What was the impetus behind starting a studio in your basement?

HM: I bought the house in 2005—just a little over ten years ago. Before that, the studio had lived in a weird form in this kind of gutted rowhouse space I was living in in Adams Morgan. But actually, bits of it had lived in my parent’s basement out in Bethesda. I don’t know when I named it—I’d have to go back and look at the recordings that I did.

One thing about Swim-Two-Birds that I noticed is that it’s a completely analog setup. What’s the benefit of that for recording?

HM: Partially, for me, it was what there was when I started recording. I mean, there was digital stuff, but it wasn’t super accessible in the way that it is now. But I also do like what happens to audio hitting tape in terms of the tape compression and sort of natural stuff, which I know can be emulated pretty well. But it still doesn’t seem quite the same to me.

KE: Part of it is psychological, in terms of the performances it coaxes out of people. Digital makes it really easy to sort of punch things in super quick and be really instantaneous. With analog, there’s a rhythm that you get into between takes because you have to pause for a moment while the tape rewinds. You listen back and can make decisions. Because you don’t get the instant visual feedback of looking at waveforms, it focuses you on your ears more and that limits that kind of feedback.

There’s also a physicality to it—I’m trying to avoid saying warmth—but it’s true. When people say “warmth,” what they’re actually talking about is a particular kind of distortion. The recording quality is actually less good, but it’s in a euphonic way. There’s a comfort to it, a familiarity.

Kevin, tell me about your work with the Future of Music Coalition. What do you think are the most pressing issues facing musicians right now?

KE: With the Future of Music Coalition, we talk about it as two big buckets: access and compensation. Access to audiences, the ability to get your music out into the world, regardless of whether you have the financial backing of big corporate partners. And compensation, the rewards for the process for creation make it back to the people who created it.

There’s a lot of conversation about streaming services and figuring out how the revenue models can work around that. One of the biggest challenges around that is figuring out what that means for scale. If you talk about industry revenues purely in terms of gross numbers, that doesn’t necessarily translate to anything meaningful when you get down to the level of an individual artist.

Hugh, you work with kids in your day job and both of you have worked with young bands, like the Black Sparks. What’s the most inspiring thing about working with kids?

HM: Well, teenagers are cooler than adults most of the time. I was so deeply resentful of the way adults treated me as a young person that I—both in teaching and general interaction with younger people—wanted to be a person in young people’s lives who takes them seriously, as real human beings and not just as not-yet-fully formed human beings. So, there’s a lot of stuff—respect for them as humans—that informs my teaching and my general interaction with young people. Stuff that I want to get right that I felt were not gotten right in my own youth by adults.

KE: It’s creatively rewarding working with young people because they have a real expansive sense of possibility. I would hesitate to use the word “mentorship” applied to my work with the Black Sparks or any other young musician we’ve worked with—partly because it’s presumptuous, and partly because it denotes a one-way transmission of information. If I’m doing it right, I’m learning at least as much from them as they are from me.

Maybe when your dad, P. Adams Sitney, is one of the bigger figures in the world of avant-garde cinema, you are destined to spend your life in film, too. Sky Sitney spent nine years growing AFI Docs (née Silverdocs) into one of the larger film festivals of its kind before leaving in 2014 to help Diana Schemo launch Double Exposure: the Investigative Film Festival this year, to much acclaim. —Steve Cavendish

Is there a film where you can look back at as one you and your dad bonded over?

So much of my early childhood experience, particularly with my father, was spent in a movie theater. I almost don’t have a memory of when that began because I was brought to films even when I was an infant. It was such a dominant thing. We lived across the street from the New Yorker film theater, which doesn’t exist anymore. I spent many weekends doing double features at the Regency. I grew up at a time where there were so many independent film theaters and, you know, we didn’t have air conditioning, so summers were truly spent there. I’m not kidding. We’d see three films in a day just to cool off.

Did you always pay? Or did you sneak from film to film?

Not then, because they weren’t multiplexes. But when the multiplexes came, sure! I’d hang out in the bathroom for 45 minutes until the next film started. But instead of having this one pivotal moment, all I can remember is film and avant-garde cinema. To an outsider, avant-garde may seem like this elitist, impenetrable kind of cinema and my father was deeply committed to it. For me, it was very accessible, but we would see everything. I can remember a weekend when we saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High followed by Zapped, featuring Scott Baio. [Laughs] So my father was high art and low art and indulged everything.

How much did it help to have Spotlight in Double Exposure’s first year to get people’s attention?

Hugely. There were a number of things that we worked hard to make happen that were fortuitous. Spotlight was critical. Edward Snowden’s appearance in the symposium with Kirby Dick and Alex Gibney and Ross Kauffman. Those are all Academy-nominated or award-winning filmmakers. All of that. I think we were leveraging our years in the field and our confidence that people might have in us based on our track records to bring a really stellar lineup. Certainly, for me, Diana was the first to even know about Spotlight. My life had been so deeply immersed in documentary that it wasn’t on my radar. And from day one, she said, “my dream would be to have Spotlight.” Because of the existing relationship I had with Participant Media, it was this perfect story where it worked for everybody. Having Spotlight, a film with such high profile and such great interest, was a wonderful plus.

It seems like over the last ten to 15 years, that the aesthetic side of what we would consider journalistic documentaries has changed. There’s a feature quality to many of them. They’ve changed how they’re telling stories. Is that fair?

Yes. There’s two areas that I think are really blossoming in documentary. One is indeed this relationship to journalism. Laura Poitras’ work with The Intercept has created this new online platform called Field of Vision that’s been getting a lot of attention and premiered at the New York Film Festival. It just keeps bursting. But the other area that seems to be hitting a major shift is indeed the use of aesthetics and the increased comfort that documentarians have using narrative techniques that would normally have been understood as purely in the realm of fictional narrative.

In many ways, this started with Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line in the 1980s. He would always say that the look of a film doesn’t guarantee truth—nothing guarantees truth. A film that uses reenactment is no more or less true than direct cinema or fly-on-the-wall camerawork. There are films that are 100-percent animation that are comfortably situated as documentary, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago.

Documentary is bursting at the seams with creativity in these areas. There are different things at stake. When a film is engaging with the world of journalism, the truth claims have to be honored and there has to be an ethical responsibility. So there’s a challenge in pushing the aesthetics that you don’t compromise what’s true.

You can peg D.C. United’s recent success to a lot of factors, but it’s unlikely that this year’s team would have made the playoffs had it not been for the heroics of goalkeeper Bill Hamid. In a game in Montreal in August, for example, United was outshot 25–1 and still managed a 1–0 win. Hamid, an Annandale native, was the first player produced by the club’s youth academy to sign professionally (in 2009) and signed a big, new contract this season. His play earned him MLS’ goalkeeper of the year honor last season and call-ups by U.S. coach Jurgen Klinsmann to the national team. —Steve Cavendish

When you talk about D.C. to friends who aren’t from here, how do you describe it?

It’s very open. You’ve got places like U Street. It’s got a vibe that is very welcoming to anybody and you can get along. You can meet people very easily here. I go to different cities. I don’t think it’s similar. There’s great restaurants.

What are you eating these days?

I like everything. [Laughs] When it comes to food, I don’t really hold back. My favorite restaurant in the city is probably Peacock Cafe. It’s got a nice little vibe, and I love the food. I usually go with the rigatoni. They make it really well. And on the plus side, I go there after training. So if it’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the owner—he’s a good guy—loves soccer, so he always has the Champions League games on. You can sit down, watch the game, and relax a little bit.

There’s not a lot of high-profile Muslim athletes in the U.S., much less in D.C. Do you feel any pressure to be a role model? I mean, there are Muslim kids here playing soccer who can look at Bill Hamid and say, “Hey, he’s like me and he’s really successful.”

I think it’s more the influence in terms of being a kid from this area and then signing on [with D.C. United] than being Muslim. There’s youth soccer players in this area from Baltimore all the way down to Richmond, and the team that they follow is D.C. United. I think the pressure of that is massive because these clubs, they’re always watching to see who came out of the D.C. United Academy. To be one of the few—me, Andy Najar, Ethan White, Conor Shanosky, Collin Martin—to come out of the Academy, I feel a lot of pressure to be a role model to all of these kids who are playing. They all have the dream. They all play FIFA [the video game]. They all watch soccer. They all have their favorite player. They want to become a professional. For me to show myself in the right way, whether it be out on the field or out in public or on social media, there’s always going to be pressure. You just want to be the right person.

You play FIFA?

All the time.

Xbox or PS4?

I’m a PS4 guy.

Who’s your team?

I’m a Manchester United fan. The team is not very strong, right now, on FIFA.

Do you play them straight up or do you “juice” the team with transfers?

Yeah, I’ve taken a few Ls. [Laughs] I’ve had to buy a few players. I went and bought Zlatan Ibrahimović (from Paris Saint-Germain); I bought Lionel Messi (from Barcelona); I bought Romelu Lukaku (from Everton); I just needed to help out the offense because United [in the game] is not very strong. In real life, they’re doing really well.

In April, former Muriel Bowser staffer LaRuby May won the Ward 8 D.C. Council seat following previous Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry’s death. Now, after securing her seat by fewer than 200 votes, she has to run again next June. —Will Sommer

Ward 8 is an iconic ward in the city. Marion Barry called it “the last, the lost, and the least.” What is different about being Ward 8 councilmember than any other ward?

I would believe that we probably have a larger percentage of native Washingtonians than other parts of the city. Downtown and other areas I believe are more transient, right? If you’re down in Foggy Bottom, when you’re around the college areas, Brookland and Foggy Bottom and different neighborhoods, you have a lot of transient people.

But in Ward 8, I think we have a lot of not only native Washingtonians but second and third and fourth and fifth generation Washingtonians. And so I think that makes it a little bit different and gives people a different sense of pride in their hometown and in their community.

What do you want to get done in the next year?

One of the reasons that I decided to take this, to run for the seat, was to be able to bridge the gap between where Ward 8 residents are in reaching their full potential and to make sure that we direct resources and investment into Ward 8 in all arenas.

Speaking of campaigning, what’s with the [May campaign color] purple? You’re always in purple, very on brand. Have you always been into purple?

So I announced in the season of Advent, and you know purple is the color of Advent. I’ve always stated that I’m unapologetically a Christian, so purple [is] not only the color of advent but a color that’s very associated with faith.

I’m OK with people connecting me to my faith and my leadership to my faith. Purple is a great color for that. I can’t tell you how many people told me “purple is not a campaign color.” Before I started, I had zero things in my closet that were purple. It just wasn’t a color that I rocked, right? Now I think I rock it better than anybody.

During the campaign, people were saying “LaRuby’s the mayor’s puppet.” What was that like?

I was pretty clear that my mom’s name is Mary, her mom’s name is Joan. My dad’s name is Theophilus, his dad’s name is Joe. So by definition, we’re different people.