Hold Your Breath | Mandie Stanton
Mandie Stanton on artistic swimming, creative identity, and building a practice from two worlds that once seemed incompatible.
I spent most of my life training for a sport where the entire goal is to disappear.
In artistic swimming, perfection means moving as one. Every movement identical, every expression synchronized, every detail controlled. I loved it because there were direct instructions for how to be better. There was always something to improve, always “one more time.”
Growing up, I didn’t always feel like I fit in. I was the weird kid, usually in my own world. Artistic swimming gave me a place to belong. It gave me a team, a purpose, and the confidence that came from being part of something people underestimated but that I thought was incredible.
The irony is that while the sport made me feel seen, it also taught me how to blend in.
Figuring out who I was outside of it was difficult, particularly as an artist. Artistic swimming gave me structure and discipline. Creativity asked me to open myself up to unpredictability and look further into myself.
I always knew I wanted to work creatively. I was filming my family with video cameras when I was little, taking photographs, obsessed with animation and filmmaking. I’ve always been drawn to things that are a little misunderstood or more complex than they appear on the surface.
When I first went to college to study animation while continuing to compete, I thought I could exist in both worlds.
I was wrong.
Neither world really wanted me to belong to the other. My coaches and teammates didn’t understand why I was pursuing something creative. My professors didn’t understand why I was still dedicating so much time to a sport. Even though I was there on a swimming scholarship, one professor told me I should quit.
Eventually, I had to choose.
Retiring from artistic swimming was heartbreaking. It felt like losing a version of myself I had spent ten years building.
When I transferred to SCAD and found motion graphics, immersive design and projection mapping, something clicked. For the first time, I found professors and creatives encouraging me to think bigger, stranger and more experimentally.
Eventually I had this idea: what if I combined the two worlds?
That became Hold Your Breath Media — immersive underwater projection mapping bringing together artistic swimming, underwater cinematography, performance and technology.
I think people often see artistic swimming and immersive media as niche or underrated spaces. I see much more potential in both. They are incredibly difficult, collaborative and emotional practices that people can overlook because they don’t fully understand what goes into them.
For me, the project is about more than creating beautiful visuals. It is about bringing visibility to forms of art and sport that deserve more recognition.
For a while, the two worlds seemed incompatible. Eventually, that tension became the work.
What started as conflict eventually became the reason my work exists.
Now I finally feel like I’m using every part of my background and experience to create something new — not despite the contradictions, but because of them.