So glad you found us! I'm Samantha Callicutt, a journalist and storyteller focused on people whose voices are too often overlooked. My work lives at the intersection of narrative, reporting, and visual storytelling, and I’m always chasing stories that challenge assumptions and spark change.

Elvio Anderson is a cinematographer and creative collaborator with a deep background in visual storytelling, street photography, and documentary film. With an eye for the cinematic and a talent for capturing authentic moments on the fly, he's the other half of this driving unit, literally and creatively.

Drive Like A Girl began the way many good stories do, by accident. I was working a story for my journalism job when I stumbled across a booth for HDS Truck Driving Institute at a local event. They handed me a flyer for something called “Ladies Night,” an open house for women curious about getting their Commercial Driver’s License. I tucked it away, thinking it might be something worth coming back to.

Then life moved on, deadlines piled up, and I forgot about it. Months later, when I was searching for a story to tell for my master’s thesis, I found the flyer again. I reached out to HDS, asked if the event was still happening, and it was! I knew I wanted to do a documentary, but I needed help. That’s when I met Elvio Anderson, who would become the other half of this production (and this driving unit, if you will). I pitched him the story over the phone, and we met for the first time at Ladies Night.

After that night, we were hooked. There was something magnetic about the energy in the room, the camaraderie, the determination, the women rewriting the rules of an industry. That same evening, we interviewed one of our first drivers, Ravyn Brooks, whose story only deepened our belief that this world needed a spotlight. We knew we wanted to do a ride-along eventually, maybe in a few weeks, once we had time to prep. But the very next day, HDS called: a driver was heading out in just two days on a long haul from Tucson to El Paso and back. If we could be ready, we could go.

We scrambled to pull together a plan and our gear. Two days later, in the early morning darkness, we met driver Bae Callahan in the parking lot of HDS headquarters. At exactly 2:00 a.m., we climbed into her cab and hit the road.

That trip, and the stories we heard, made one thing clear: this wasn’t just a film about trucking. It was about women claiming space, taking the wheel, and redefining what power looks like on the road.

And the rest, as they say, is history.