“If you’re a teacher and you’re not learning from your students, then you’re not really teaching, are you?” filmmaker Spike Lee asked during a mentor panel discussion at Rolex Arts Weekend, celebrated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on September 10. Affirming the fluid and collaborative aspects of mentorship, the multi-award-winning director and New York University professor is one of four personalities perpetuating the tradition of passing on wisdom and knowledge of their craft to young artists as part of the 2020-2022 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Lee worked with Native American filmmaker Kyle Bell.
“The next generation are all important to me, and I look to them as my mentors,” added British director Phyllida Lloyd, the woman behind and the mentor of the Theatre category. Lloyd was working with protégée Whitney White, a gifted musical theatre artist of whom the former said: “Maybe she doesn’t need a mentor, but I do, and she could be it. She can sit down at the piano and blow you away with her compositions, direct a play, act in it; there’s not much she can’t do.”
