Andrew Robert Colom

Andrew Robert Colom is a creator, investor, and believer. A third-generation business founder and civic leader, he carries a family legacy of forging opportunity while opening new lanes for overlooked people, places, and stories.

Born in Mississippi and based in Detroit, Andrew moves between the South and the Midwest with equal weight in business and art. He is the co-founder of Century Partners, a multimillion-dollar development company reshaping the Rust Belt since 2014, and founder of CK Realty in Mississippi, where he built a portfolio of more than 200 homes and apartments. His newest venture, Story ARC, extends his entrepreneurial vision into culture: a company reimagining the stories America tells and the ways those stories are experienced.

Raised in Columbus, MS, the son of a civil rights lawyer and a judge, Andrew grew up with a front-row seat to structural inequality. Even as a child, shooting films on the family Panasonic camera, he imagined a path that fused business discipline with creative power — carrying forward his family’s fight for justice while giving his community’s voice a stage.

Andrew remained in the city for graduate school, heading to New York University where The New York Times awarded him a full, merit-based scholarship to pursue a Master of Fine Arts. During his two years at NYU, he studied creative writing with esteemed writers E.L. Doctorow and Jayne Anne Phillips.

At Columbia University and later at New York University — where he earned an MFA on full scholarship — Andrew honed his voice as both artist and leader, deepening his belief in storytelling as a force that shapes generations.

In 2009, he returned to Mississippi, building his first real estate company and directing The Flight of Calvin Waters, a short film about the suspicious death of Black high school football star Billy Joe Johnson. The film won the Ron Beard Award at the Magnolia Film Festival and screened widely.

Five years later, inspired by the story of Ossian and Gladys Sweet — who defended their Detroit home against a white mob in 1925 and forced open the doors of housing integration — Andrew co-founded Century Partners with David Alade. That work later gave rise to One Sweet Night (2020), starring J.D. Williams of The Wire and produced through Story ARC. In 2021, he wrote the pilot for Fever: Little Willie John, an acclaimed TV development project with Gotham TV Lab and Film London. He is currently seeking an agent and publisher for his first novel.

Today, Andrew lives in Detroit in one of the very homes his company helped restore, with his wife, writer Rose Hackman, and their reluctant dog, Alfie. He remains committed to building futures from the overlooked — widening them until no door can ever close again.