Selorm Kploanyi
Creating Her Own Way
by Raven Moran
“I didn’t know if this was a look-good kind of interview or we’re just chatting,” she jokes, gesturing to her outfit. “But I’ve got something to do after this, so I thought, why not?” A moment later, when asked about her beginnings, she smiles again. “Oh, is this my origin story?!”
The humor comes quickly, almost instinctively. So does the warmth. Even through playful detours, Selorm speaks with precision, choosing each word carefully. Her voice is grounding, calm, and thoughtful—a fitting contrast for someone whose career has been built on embracing creative unpredictability.
Raised in Somerset, New Jersey, Selorm never imagined a straight path into entertainment. In high school, a librarian secretly submitted one of her video projects for a scholarship in video production. She won. Looking back, it feels like one of those quiet moments that only reveals its significance years later. Producing and editing videos eventually helped her realize she was just as interested in being in front of the camera as she was behind it.
Still, practicality won out in college. She earned a business degree, admitting that studying theatre likely would not have received her parents' financial support. “Funny enough, I don’t even know if I would call myself business-minded despite my degree in business,” she laughs.
After graduation, she moved west not because California guaranteed success, but because it represented something entirely different. New York had always been close enough to feel familiar. “I used to sneak out to New York in high school,” she recalls. “It was right in my backyard.” California offered reinvention.
The move led her into production, first as an assistant at BuzzFeed before eventually becoming a producer. Her work expanded across projects including The Kelly Clarkson Show, People vs. Food, Studio71, and the BuzzFeed production company Cocoa Butter, where she produced the comedy series Things Black People Don't Do. Yet after years of creating stories for everyone else, she began asking herself what it would look like to create for herself.
“I have leaned more into being a creator for myself in these last couple of years,” she says.
The shift arrived in the wake of the pandemic, a period that sharpened her desire for personal expression. Posting her own work required confronting a different kind of vulnerability. “It was important for me to push through that fear and anxiety that you can get from posting.”
Then came fifteen seconds that changed everything.
One casually edited video—originally sitting forgotten in her drafts—featured her joking that she needed 100,000 Instagram followers by New Year's. On New Year's Eve, it exploded. Overnight, she reached the milestone she had been chasing.
Ironically, achieving the goal loosened its grip on her.
“Hitting my goal made me chill out and stop putting so much pressure on myself and my content,” she says. The experience reinforced something every creator learns eventually: the internet rarely rewards perfection. Some of her most carefully edited work reached fewer people than the spontaneous video that took only moments to make.
Today, Selorm continues hosting and producing People vs. Food while expanding her work in front of the camera. This past year, she starred in the short film In The Morning, a story exploring faith amid collective grief in a post-pandemic world, and appeared alongside Wiz Khalifa in a commercial. Yet her future feels increasingly personal.
“I am really trying to infuse more music into my content. I love it, and it brings me joy, which is really important to remember when having a job that can be parasocial.”
“There's something about LA as a person in entertainment where you feel so tied to this place, and it's hard to leave...”
That joy, she explains, is inseparable from community. More than numbers or algorithms, she values the relationship she has built with an audience that returns not for perfection, but for consistency.
Even as Los Angeles has become home, she recognizes its complicated hold on artists. “There's something about LA as a person in entertainment where you feel so tied to this place, and it's hard to leave,” she reflects. Still, she remains open to wherever the work may lead.
Part of that openness has also brought her closer to her roots. Her family is Ghanaian, from the Ewe tribe, and although she did not visit Ghana until her early twenties, the trips have become deeply meaningful. “I've grown closer to my family in my adult years because of these trips,” she says, describing the experience of seeing another side of the people who raised her.
Listening to Selorm speak, it becomes clear that her story isn't defined by one viral moment or one career pivot. It is a collection of quiet decisions: a librarian's unexpected belief, a cross-country move toward the unfamiliar, the courage to publish something imperfect, and the willingness to keep creating even when the outcome cannot be predicted.
Words by Raven Moran
Photos provided by Artist
