How a filmmaker built the most inclusive stage in music.
Across nine years of Grammy nominations in the major categories, women were 13.4% of nominees, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found. Men took the rest. Rebecca Autumn Sansom saw the split and built her own stage.
She was running Blonde Records then, the label she’d built around trans, nonbinary and artists of color. The pandemic froze the business, and the odds of her roster ever reaching a Grammy got longer.
“Everyone was freaking out, and I was like, oh my gosh, we’re never gonna go to the Grammys,” Sansom said. “It’s time to try everything, because this is it, this is the end.”
She called two friends, Kristin and Sam, with the pitch: “We gotta do The Wavys.” Eleven people showed up to the first meeting in December 2020. Six years later, that room is a 501(c)3 institution presented by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, backed by a 2023 Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action Award, and set to hand out its sixth round of trophies Sept. 5 in New York.
Dethroning the Grammys was never the intention. Sansom built a parallel instead, a stage with its own name and its own standards. “Now I have to create a sort of the Grammys for the rest of us,” she said. The show still welcomes everyone, allies and major-label artists included, but it centers the artists the spotlight usually misses.
Before The Wave
Sansom built her name in film. She won a 2015 Midsouth Regional Emmy for the travel series “Tout Your Town” and screened her high-speed-rail documentary “Trainsforming America” at the U.S. Capitol. She still introduces herself as “a filmmaker trapped in an artist’s body” — someone who’d rather document the room than stand in the center of it. “I really feel like I can relate to artists, and that’s why I like cheerleading them and hyping them,” she said. “But I don’t want to get on stage, because I’m a filmmaker.”
That instinct produced her most personal work. “Reckoning with the Primal Wound,” released in 2022 and still touring festivals, is the first documentary made by an adoptee and her birth mother together, built around the trauma theory in Nancy Verrier’s 1993 book on relinquishment. Sansom didn’t make it for a festival circuit. She made it for family. “I felt like I had to make it because I had two relatives at the same time going through struggles with addiction, and one of them was really close to me,” she said. “My mother was actually planning the funeral.”
Her first move was to get one of them the book. He wouldn’t read it, so she went looking for a film version and found none. Then, seven months pregnant, she learned the author lived 45 minutes away in the Bay Area. She read that as an assignment. So she made the film herself. Both relatives recovered. The work outlasted the crisis that started it. “I think the film has helped a lot of other people that are struggling with the manifestations that being an adopted person can present,” Sansom said. A sequel, “Reckoning with the Paternal Wound,” is three years into production and now in the edit.
All WEGOT
The filmmaker’s eye built the room, too. Sansom engineered The Wavys around the feeling artists get once they’re inside it. “We were able to create a space that feels inclusive and safe for artists,” she said. “That’s what I get feedback on the most, that the vibe we’ve curated is the most inclusive, the most safe space that some of these artists who have been marginalized throughout life and their careers can go to and just feel comfortable.”
The room now runs on a full operation: a workshop, a 2026 Ambassadors program, “Wavy Certified” service providers and membership tiers that fund artists directly instead of through a label advance. Ten ambassadors are in the pipeline. Sansom described the model plainly. “Can we really fund these artists,” she said, “using the nonprofit umbrella, where it’s a tax write-off for anybody who’s donating, and then the Wavys benefits with an admin fee by putting it all together and distributing the funds.” The order of operations matters to her. “I want the money to go to artists,” she said.
That thinking shows up in the programming most awards shows skip. Before one ceremony, The Wavys ran a workshop led by Kacie Luaders, founder of the Atlanta production company Could Be Pretty Cool, now a Wavys partner. It stuck with Sansom. “That’s everything I want The Wavys to be,” she said. “I feel like the powers that be do not want this model, because it is holistic, I’m thinking of the whole artist.”
Which loops back to the Grammys, and to the shorthand Sansom keeps reaching for when she explains what a Wavy actually does. She sees it as a first credential, the one that unlocks the development an artist needs to climb. “It makes sense to me that Wavy would be the first one,” she said, “to give an artist that boost of like you’re an award-winning artist. Now what can we do to help you grow your art and get you out there to more people, and do that artist development.” Then she spelled out the ladder: “You get the Wavy, then you get the Emmy, then you get the Grammy. Yes, it makes so much sense.”
Call it WEGOT. Put a Wavy in front of the EGOT and you get the sequence Sansom is building toward. Say it out loud and you get the promise underneath it: WEGOT you.
Support the mission — “Save the Wave”
The Wavys is a 501(c)3 dedicated to emerging artists who lead with creativity, purpose and community. Through its Ambassador Program, the org supplies individual artists with resources, mentorship and mission-aligned support. It’s now raising to replace donations that froze when its former platform, Flipcause, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. All processing has moved directly to a PayPal Charity account — no middleman. Back the artists whose funds got caught in the freeze: Operation Save the Wave.
