Growing up in income-based housing in Dayton, Ohio, Jamee Ranta says “opportunities were nonexistent” — and while she dreamed of becoming an astronaut, music had a more formative impact. Ranta has now worked alongside some of music’s biggest stars as CEO of Artifact Content, a multimedia production company she founded in 2017. She first arrived in Los Angeles nearly a decade prior and hustled to break into the industry, working on as many music video sets as she could. Self-employed since 18, Ranta’s bet on herself has more than paid off: Her work on Cardi B’s “WAP” helped the clip win the 2021 BET video of the year award, and she more recently executive-produced the visual for Justin Bieber’s Grammy Award-nominated “Peaches.”
Now, Ranta is eager for her next adventure: management, signing burgeoning Colombian American singer-songwriter Nathalie Paris as her first client near the end of 2021. “I love the logistical side of making art because it’s very commonly underappreciated,” says Ranta. “I enjoy being part of those systems to support the artist.
Halsey’s hourlong film If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, released in 2021 to accompany their fourth album by the same name, was Ranta’s first theatrical release. “Every time I do a project, I live and breathe it,” she says. “This had a very dark storyline. We were in a dark castle. You learn about who you are in the midst of darkness.” Filmed over six weeks in Prague, the project faced various obstacles, from the country shutting down due to COVID-19 restrictions to Halsey’s health during the artist’s pregnancy. “We were all able to pull from personal things,” she adds. “But you need darkness to see the stars.”
Ranta previously worked with Lopez in 2019 on the visual for “Medicine” (featuring French Montana) and the accompanying It’s My Party tour visuals. But for the pair’s latest collaboration, “Marry Me” — the lead single from the rom-com soundtrack of the same name — the executive producer was able to fulfill a dream by partnering with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson. Produced through Artifact this year, the video for “Marry Me” was also its most ambitious venture yet. “It’s a raw deconstruction of who she is,” says Ranta, “and the not-so-luxurious parts of the daily life of an artist like Jennifer.”
Ranta first met Bieber in 2012 while working on a treatment of his “Boyfriend” video. Ten years later, she says she’s “in awe of his trajectory” and feels particularly proud of watching his growth “translate into his music and the videos we created.” Those most recently include the 2021 Justice visuals that Ranta executive-produced, from the Diane Keaton co-starring “Ghost” (in which she says Keaton brought “the most magical” energy to the set) to “Peaches,” which earned Ranta her first Grammy nod for best music video/film. The objective for the latter visual was simple: “Show Justin in his element. We hadn’t seen that since he was a kid.”
This story originally appeared in Billboard’s 2022 Women in Music issue, dated Feb. 26, 2022.