I often interview artists about their stories, practices, and values. Here’s a question-set use.

1. What’s your story as an artist? What drew you to your art? What are the big turns in the story?
2. Who are your primary artistic relationships, influences, compatriots, or mentors?
3. Where are you in your arts career (emerging, established, mid-career, etc.)?
4. What is your art? What do you name or describe it? How do you think of your art (e.g., as a calling? as a hobby? as a profession, as a part-time job)?
5. In your view, what is creativity? What is art?
6. Give me a nuts-and-bolts description of what you do as an artist. Describe a specific day, hour, task, project, or interaction . Describe typical day, hour, task, project, or interaction.
7. Describe one space in which you work (either because you want to or have to). Take an exterior perspective and picture yourself in that space. Describe what you see/hear.
   1. Take an interior perspective; describe what you feel, see, think, hear.
8. If you had to summarize or epitomize your artistic identity in 2-3 actual or imagined photos or images, what would they look like?
9. As an artist, what feelings, attitudes, and values do you cultivate? Not cultivate, avoid, or reject?
10. What things or objects are most necessary to your artistic practice? What do you do with them? Where are they? Why are they important?
11. What rhythms (hourly, daily, weekly, yearly) shape your artistic practice?
12. Is your art framed by, or embedded in a ritual, practice, or routine? How do you sustain your art? In what ways does it sustain you? Fail to sustain you?
13. What’s your artistic process? What are the “products” that come from it? How do you think of the relationship between artistic processes and products?
14. How social or solitary are you as an artist?
15. When you talk about your art, what words and phrases recur?
16. What is your art not? What does it say “no” to? What is it “against?”
17. Characterize the ups and downs of your life as an artist.
18. Which of your works of art are you most proud of? Why? Least proud of? Why?
19. Locate yourself in the arts community? What is your “tribe?” How big is your “pond,” and how big or small a fish are you in it? To whom is your art important?
20. Do you ever flatline, plateau, or become blocked or burned out as an artist? Describe one of your failures.
21. How do you recover? What are the difficulties in bouncing back?
22. What are your limitations or constraints as an artist?
23. Do you teach your art? What’s your teaching style? In your experience, what’s the relationship between teaching and learning in your art?
24. Do you value art for its own sake? For the sake of what it can do or achieve? Are you an activist or a contemplative? What does your art do for others, for society? How efficacious is your art? What can your art not do?
25. What’s the relationship between your art and your life?
26. How do your family and living situation influence your art?
27. Do you have any images or stories of artistic aging, decline, or death? How do you imagine the “dying of the light” in your artistic clan? When a dancer/singer/etc. ages, gets sick, or becomes deeply compromised, what happens?
28. What question that you’ve not been asked would you like to be asked? Feel free to revise any of these questions to make them more appropriate to you.