[Q&A] Gia Mora
How one artist is helping Hollywood & the music industry embrace science stories
Wouldn’t it be interesting if people would pay attention to science as much as they paid attention to whatever Kim Kardashian had to say?
—Gia Mora
A few weeks ago, I was accepted into the Climatebase Fellowship program, which connects people who care deeply about climate change so that we can learn from each other’s expertise. One might imagine this type of forum would only be for scientists, techies, and entrepreneurs, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve been meeting other writers, journalists, teachers, and creative-minded folks who are redefining what it means to work in climate. One such person is Gia Mora, an award-winning producer, actress, singer, and writer who lives in Los Angeles. Gia uses her many talents to make songs, short films, etc. that tell stories about science and sustainability in a humorous and memorable way. She hopes that by communicating the intricacies of difficult fields like physics and climatology, science will become a relatable, comprehensible part of our everyday lives.
I too have that goal — In Circulation was founded on the idea that the ocean should be easily accessible to everyone, conceptually if not literally. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Gia agreed to be interviewed for In Circulation! We discussed topics like ocean literacy, science’s inherent musicality, the difference between ‘writing’ and ‘communication,’ and much more.
This interview has been edited for clarity, and because Substack has a limit on how long written posts can be. If you’d like the “director’s cut,” feel free to listen to this audio file (uh oh, am I now a podcaster?). Otherwise, read on!
Background & motivation
Diana: Welcome, Gia!
Gia: Thank you for having me, Diana. I’m thrilled to be here! I love your Substack, where you’ve combined your oceanography with your poetry and your climate activism. I think it’s so cool. It’s right up my alley.
D: Thank you! Okay. You are a very creative person, so I was wondering what first got you interested in doing climate work?
G: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had massive empathy with animals; even in my baby logs when the doctor told my parents to feed me meat to make sure I was not allergic to it, the notes say I wouldn’t eat the meat. So I've been a lifelong vegetarian and was vegan for many, many years. A story that I love to tell is that I got to sing for the Dalai Lama as part of a children's choir in the late ‘90s. Afterwards as we were listening to his talk, he told us although he is vegetarian, when he goes to someone’s home he eats whatever meal they serve him because they’ve made the sacrifice to give him food, and he would never shun their offering to him with his own righteousness. And that really changed my perspective from being an ardent, angry, militant sort of vegetarian. And that's the reason I understand why people feel so strongly about climate change — it’s why we're having soup thrown on Van Goghs. But we must take a more practical approach and meet people where they are. And if we all start from that empathetic place, then we can create a better world together.
That also comes back to my creative work in that, you know, acting is all about empathy: you’re literally putting yourself into someone else's shoes, feeling what they feel, and then communicating that to other people. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that my personal and professional worlds sort of collided: after in-person acting jobs went out of fashion, a friend of mine sent me a job posting for TreeHugger, the world’s largest sustainability website, as they were looking for an expert on food sustainability. Well, I have been doing the vegan/sustainable food thing for a very, very long time, and my life expertise actually helped me get the job. I love getting the chance to use all my creative skills to talk about climate, to tell people not that they’re “bad” because they eat meat, but to say, “hey, do you know that if you just reduce the amount of meat that you consume, that you too could have an enormous impact on climate? And you don’t have to feel like you've given up everything you’ve ever come to know as food?” And that's what's brought me here.
Ocean literacy
D: A lot of the climate education campaigns are directed at young people, who don't have decision-making power. That's why I think what you do with the creative arts is so important because it is directed more at an adult audience. If you make climate and ocean stories part of people’s daily lives via the media that they consume, it will be easier for folks to create that emotional connection. So instead of just thinking “Oh, I know about this,” folks will feel that they understand it in a deeper way.
G: I think that’s a really strong point, and you're right, we don't think about music as a tool nearly as much when we’re trying to communicate with adults, except as a marketing technique. And that is, I think, a mistake. That's why I like the idea of climate anthems because they tell a story through song. All stories ask, “what is the meaning of life through this moment?” And if we don't have that ‘why,’ then the story won’t speak to people. They might wonder why they should care about the ocean because they live far inland or are concerned about their fields going fallow or the price of gasoline increasing or all these other things that are more immediate to their everyday existence. It's understandable that all this other stuff just sounds like external noise because there is no emotional resonance: we haven’t made the connection between the rain and the oceans and the rivers and the animals. So if we can integrate these concepts like we’ve integrated tech into our lives, eventually they'll become a part of our story that we tell ourselves that gives us meaning. And I think it's our job as artists and writers to give us that feeling, that connection.
Why “writing” and “communication” aren’t the same
D: Before we started recording this interview, you and I were discussing the difference between writing and communication, in that some people use writing as a tool for communication, ignoring the storytelling potential of the writing itself. I know you've done a lot of writing, both creative and journalistic, and I was wondering if you could just tell me a bit about how you differentiate between the two?
G: Wow, that is such a great question. So in between when I was acting full-time and when I started writing full-time, for a long time I had a one-woman comedy show called Einstein’s Girl, with music about theoretical physics, wherein I told the story of modern physics via the metaphor of falling in love. In theoretical physics, particles burst in and out of existence in a vacuum, so my metaphor was that that’s like falling in love: there’s a spark somewhere and maybe that spark becomes a love affair and maybe that spark becomes a universe. And if there are multiverses, then maybe there are multiple times that you can fall in love that will be infinitely as exciting and wonderful as all the other times that you fall in love. And that was where I accidentally figured out that both [science] communication and storytelling can happen at the same time: I was inadvertently teaching theoretical physics just by writing jokes about it. So, “writing” is where we ask our listeners or our readers to fill in the blanks. I think “communication” does not leave blanks to be filled in — it’s more explicit and has a more direct goal. That’s how I would define it anyway.
D: Yeah, because some people like to write in a very objective manner, as if they were themselves scientists presenting the facts. And then, you’re right, that leaves very little room for the reader to put themselves into that story. It’s really important, I think, for science communicators to be good, creative writers and, if appropriate, good performers as well.
Fusing science with creativity
D: I know you try to incorporate aspects of contemporary scientific research into your work. I was wondering how you get that information: do you look at news articles or scientific papers? And how do you interpreting what you read and making it a part of your performances and of your writing?
G: Oh, that’s a wonderful question. I am obsessed with Google Scholar and enjoy digging very deep into the research. When writing Einstein's Girl I had to learn a lot of physics, at least to get a very rudimentary understanding of it to be able to write jokes and songs about it. And I wrote lyrics to Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca about the Big Bang, what the Big Bang was, and when it all began (e.g. there was nothing here, 14 billion years ago the ‘nothing’ heated up). The joke in the Big Bang is like, you want to get banged, so there’s a big bang. I always start with the joke and then dig into the research so that my work is actually very accurate. In my cover of a song about the discovery of the Higgs Boson (which was lyriced by actual scientists at CERN) I added a big joke about supersymmetry in the middle of it because I needed to have something funny. But in the joke about supersymmetry, I explained supersymmetry. And so I think there’s a fun way where you catch people off guard: they don’t know that you’re about to lay some heavy knowledge on them. Then they walk away and are like, “I remember that [concept] because I heard it in a song. It’s catchy.”
The reason why music is such an effective tool for communication is our brains are wired for that — there’s a reason we have earworms, right? The magic of song comes from combining actual research with a melody, which teaches people science in a fun, non-preachy way. I’m working on a piece right now about a bunch of different artists who are writing music about the climate and searching for climate anthems. Their work raises the question: How many communities need an anthem for this movement? Because you reach different people through different genres, do you need choral or orchestral music? What about punk rock, pop, or R&B? It’s important to recognize how you engage with the popular cultures of those communities and then communicate [climate science] within that space. And that’s, again, this subterfuge: not only does it stick in our brains as being an effective tool for remembering something we’ve just heard, but it also taps at that emotional core. And that’s when you get people.
The language of science
D: One thing that struck me about what you were just saying is when you’re reading through scientific papers or looking at scientific concepts, you like fixate on specific words (i.e. ‘bang’ in ‘the Big Bang’) and use them as a jumping off point. You’re not changing the science in any way, just like reinterpreting it. Would you say then that songwriting and doing music-related things is the most effective form of science writing or science communication?
G: The language of science is a language, right? And so part of it is, if you don’t speak science, it’s hard to know what you're reading, so I try to translate. I think that science is also only one form of communicating the realities of the world — like, indigenous science is different from physics and mathematics, but it is equally a useful tool in understanding our place in the world. One of the best things I ever learned in producing this show that I’m working on called I Am a Scientist, where we’ve interviewed scientists from all over the world. There’s this idea that science is looking for this hard, objective, capital-T truth, but then you talk to people who actually work in science and they’re like, you don't think science is also completely subjective? Every question that we ask is through a subjective lens. So to act as if humans, because they’re doing science, somehow become objective beings is absurd. Yes, I understand that we’re measuring the movement of one quantum entity to another space, I understand we are looking at rising sea surface temperature, but that is not the end-all be-all of what that is, because it’s still framed in the question of who’s asking it. It’s all through those lenses that we see those worlds. And as much as I love science, I just have to always remind myself, it’s only one lens, only one language to describe what we’re looking at, and music is another.
D: I think that it’s important to realize that, you know, the data that scientists find in these such experiments is irrefutable and it’s something that like we as the public should be encouraged to respect. Another interesting point is media outlets tend to cover one piece of research at a time: they always portray it as if it’s a singular thing and not part of a broader field of study. And one thing that irks me is they never really discuss how the study came about — was it because oceanographers were looking at robotic vehicles and trying to measure currents and then people came up with this idea. Many science communicators never talk about the communal aspects of the science, and I think that that's what makes things so hard for the general public to understand. Because then it seems like we’re revering this one group of scientists instead of putting their work in context with the many other studies that are also happening in that field.
G: Yeah, I really think that you’re right about the community aspect of it. The other big challenge for all science communicators is to be able to explain the self-revising nature of science. That is very hard for people to accept. In general, I think human beings, they like a definitive answer, right? Like gravity feels pretty definitive until you shoot a rocket up into space and you realize you actually can escape Earth's gravitational pull—
D: But it still is just a “theory,” right?
G: Yeah. Right. And that again is the challenge of the language: most people can't tell you the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. And what we mean colloquially as theory and what we mean as scientific theory are two different things. So there’s this huge education gap that I think communicators are always trying to fill.
“An ode to the ocean?”
D: So, Gia, you seem like the kind of person that always has lots of different projects and you have lots of different interests and you really like learning about all the different aspects of climate change and of science. And I was wondering if and how you incorporate the ocean and marine science themes into the kind of work that you do, and what specifically about oceanography or marine science do you find most interesting?
G: My partner’s grandfather was a renowned ichthyologist, so he has a very ocean-affiliated background. However, I grew up in the mountains, but now that I have lived on the East Coast and West Coast, I feel a lot more connected to the ocean than I ever did as a kid. We do a lot of beach cleanups here. My latest music video, which is called Take Some Action (to Get Some Action) was based off data from OKCupid that showed that climate change was the number one deal breaker for daters: you were more likely to get a match if you expressed concern for the climate. So we wrote a sexy R&B hip-hop song that was all about taking action for the climate so that you can find somebody that also likes the climate, and the video is all about cleaning up the beach. But now you’ve inspired me. I really need to do more oceanography. I think I need to write an ode to the ocean now!
Final thoughts
D: Okay, so final question: I was wondering if there's anything that you're working on right now that you would like to tell us about?
G: I actually have a Substack too called Animal Matters, which is bi-monthly, where I write uplifting stories about life on a warming planet. I aim to give readers easy, everyday ways that they can take climate action in their lives – and there's almost always some sort of musical element to each newsletter, so if you like music, you can check it out. And there will be a couple more articles coming out shortly that you can read on my website, giamora.com.
D: Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Gia! This has been such a fun and illuminating interview.
G: Thanks, Diana. Thank you for having me on. I so appreciated it.
What a joy speaking to another Earth-loving, poetry-writing, Climatebase fellow! Thank you so much for sharing your work with the world and for using creativity to make the world a better place. Now to write an ode to the ocean... :) XO!
Interesting interview on the intercession of arts & science - I don’t know about her song writing