Why did you pursue an artistic or creative career?

Ren Montoro | Actress

Admittedly, I didn’t start off pursuing an artistic field. Well, let me take it a step back. Growing up, I was always setting up impromptu plays with my brothers. I’d run around the house pretending that I was this or that cartoon character. For a long while, I wanted to be a singer, but it turns out that this girl can’t sing. By the time I graduated high school, I’d been doing theatre for a while, though I was admittedly pretty shy when not on the stage. The thought of having to audition for a living, which is the majority of acting, made me incredibly uncomfortable. For this reason, I decided to study Art History instead of theatre. I wanted to be a professor, I thought. About a semester into college, I started to realize how much I missed performing and general storytelling. The want and need to tell stories nagged at me until I finally decided to go back to performing; only by that point, acting in film had popped up on my radar. To me, film acting seemed like something people like me didn’t get to do until I went to college, that is. I realized how different the stories you can tell with film are, how they can reach people, and it represents a wide array of people. Read more>>

Jake L. Mitchell | Cinematographer

When it comes to artistic fields, it seems that there are as many unique paths as there are people. Wether it be through luck, happenstance, or devout dedication. For me, becoming a Cinematographer was never a question. I’ve known exactly what I wanted to be and done everything in my power to be strive for my artistic goals. Whenever I sit down in a theater or in front of a screen to watch a film, I remember why I make films. I love the pure power of cinema to transport the imagination and its ability to steep it in new worlds both extravagant or simple. It helps us escape outward or on the flip, discover inward. My passion for film also comes from the enjoyment I get from showing others work I have made. Cinematography to me is emotion. Each of its attributes can be controlled and manipulated to stir a feeling within a viewer and is essential in translating the essence of a story. My passion in viewing and presenting work is what continues to drive me. Read more>>

Daniel Nufer | Actor | Screenwriter | Comedic Idiot

I spent a good part of my life absolutely certain that a career in the arts was the only option for me. I can’t exactly explain why, but other careers just didn’t interest me. Then I grew up. And suddenly the arts were–at best–something people who get really, really lucky get to spend their life doing. So I went to college, got a degree that would suit me well in a strongly Capitalistic society and got a job at a Fortune 50 Company and quickly rose through the ranks. But by 25 I was professionally miserable. I had no creative pursuits to sustain me and during the work day I felt like the white collar suits I grew up scoffing at. So I took a chance. Started taking improv classes in Chicago at the Second City, did pretty well. Found myself in a few short films. And in 2018 I took the real plunge and moved to Los Angeles full-time. So to get back to answering your question instead of this prosaic, semi-biopic rambling, why did I pursue an artistic career? I hate to fall back on the old adage, but I didn’t have a choice. Read more>>

Ray Carr | Artist & Spiritual Guru

It was already my whole life . experiences and connections with life have made the images of my imagination much more vivid . once I found myself , within myself ; the urge to share it and create on a grander scale seemed fitting the vision , in a way that I didn’t understand yet . once I started getting deeper into my art , the world responded. Read more>>

Teresa Lo | Writer & Comedian

Ever since I was a kid I loved reading and writing, and I dreamed of being a writer. My family wanted me to do something more traditional, like be a lawyer, and I tried to follow that path but I was so miserable that I made steps to pursue a creative career full-time. Working in the arts and entertainment is a constant struggle, but I love it and doing other things doesn’t fulfill me. I think that pursuing this life was something I just had to do. Read more>>

Florisela Baca | Ceramic Artist

I am a Registered Nurse by training, with that said I also have a passion for ceramics. My interest in Clay began in High School. I had the most amazing teacher named Leslie Jensen, she is actually retired now and teaching at a community center. She introduced me to clay, encouraged me and guided me. After high school I was at a cross roads, do I pursue Art? or Nursing. My practical mind took over and I choose Nursing. My passion for ceramics and clay never went away. I nurtured it, i tool classes at community college and community centers. Ceramics like anything in life takes practice. Eventually I ended up in OR, my husband and I purchased a home and I was at a place that I had space to start my own studio. Fast forward a few years. I decided to start my Esty shop and about 1 year later an Instagram account. It has been about 1 year since starting the IG account and I have learned lots and continue to learn and develop my own voice and style. Read more>>

Mike Cuenca | Writer & Director

It’s the need to tell stories. The need to be able to connect with someone. I make movies for myself. Subjects that I relate to or would want to see portrayed in an offbeat way or find interesting. So the ultimate goal is to find other people that see themselves in something one creates. You feel less alone with your thoughts, or with your humor, or anger, or flights of romance. So… to find an audience that gets it. It’s like when you meet a special someone and you’re two peas in a pot. Read more>>

Leslie Fuentes | Designer & Founder at Haus of Astral // ModernWoman LA

Although I’ve always been interested and involved in ‘creative’ fields since I was 13 or so, I actually wanted a more formal path. I always felt like a career in the creative field was extremely risky because the art / design world is too subjective at the end of the day. But life had other plans for me after constantly attempting to be more administrative focused. I always joke, ‘I wanted to do Marketing but ended up in Design’. But it isn’t an accident, my passion does remain in all things design and function, so although my original perception of a creative career was jaded by fear, it is what I’m supposed to be doing. Me owning my own Creative house of all things creativity, design, and marketing has allowed me to expand and truly embody the many layers of myself. I’m not a marketer without my design skills and Im not a designer without my marketing skills — It all connects at one point. Read more>>

Larry Li | Visual Artist

I grew up on Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Anime’s, and Jabbawockeez, and behind all these cultural icons were Asian creatives. Those were the Asian people I looked up to, and they were hard to find. Especially growing up in the Silicon Valley, Bay Area, where there are a lot of families like mine. Immigrant parents with first generation born American kids struggling to feel a sense of individualism in a system that only valued the highest test scores and the most prestigious colleges. It seemed like the model for our futures have been predetermined as children of immigrants. We owed it to our parents who traveled from these far lands to become that doctor, engineer or lawyer. Pursuing a career in the arts as a Chinese boy from where I came from was a direct challenge to not only my parents but to the model minority myth this country expected of me. Read more>>

Tomer Oz | Muay Thai instructor | Fight Choreographer | Action Actor & Stunt Performer

People who knows me will always tell you how I look at my career, “make your passion your profession”. I believe that when you pursuing your passion , if you succeed in it or not , you will never fail because you are doing something you enjoy doing. I personally can not work in a job that I don’t have full motivation to do. As I dedicated all my life to martial arts, I knew that that will be the source of my income, I pushed to the limits to be the best I could be so I can teach, perform and work on having that life style as my business. Read more>>

Harlis Sweetwater | Music Artist/Singer-Songwriter

I feel that writing, recording and most importantly, PERFORMING music, IS and always has been my calling in life. I feel it’s what I was born to do. There never was a plan B for me. My life has always been about music. Read more>>

German Briseño | Producer/Musician/Artist

I felt I was made for it, and at some point around 21 I realized the only life worth living was that one where you try to spend as much of your time doing what you feel you should be doing. Read more>>

Shivawn Mitchell | Executive Producer

While in film school I saw a gap in the type of stories that were being told and who had the power to tell them. When I stood up to say what type of feature film I wanted to write I was put into a box of what they thought I wanted to create. The wonderful thing about creativity is that it’s from our perspective of the life we’ve lived and the people we’ve encountered along our journey. If we limit who gets to hold the pen, stand behind the camera or greenlight the project we are missing out on many colorful stories. It was in that moment of standing up in class that I made a promise to myself to tell Good stories, Equip more Storytellers and Greenlight those stories that wouldn’t traditionally get picked up. Read more>>

Ali MacLean | Playwright/Actor/TV Content Creator

I gravitated towards writing and acting at a young age as a way to understand why people behave as they do and to try to make sense of human emotions. Of course, my inspirations back then ranged from Han Solo, The Fox and The Hound, and Saturday Night Live. I write to process the world around me whether external or intimate. It’s my passion and it has helped me recover from challenges that had stunted my life. However, these life experiences have raised my level of empathy have strengthened my voice. The characters I write are multi-dimensional and often challenged and complicated because the people I know are. Most recently I’ve been working as a playwright. I love the theater because I think it fosters empathy, something the world is short on these days. They say that when watching a play everyone in the audience’s heartbeats syncs together. I love that idea. I know that if I can reveal my difficulties and triumphs, or disclose my foibles in a play, it can free others f to speak about theirs. That’s what is needed to create community. Read more>>

Lisa Clayton | Sourdough Baker

To me, creativity is like an obsession or a compulsion. There isn’t a moment when I don’t have multiple ideas in my head for things I want to create, and I find it difficult to stop thinking about them. Coming from an artistic family perhaps it runs in my blood, but it wasn’t immediately obvious that I would end up in a creative career. I completed an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Oxford, which is of course a very academic institution, and for four years after graduating I pursued a corporate career but was completely miserable. At work I would daydream about creative projects and carry a notebook around for writing down ideas and designs. One of the things I struggled with the most was pressure from myself to justify my degree but also all of my peers had successful careers in academia or medicine and I couldn’t help but measure myself against their yardstick. One of the biggest challenges for me was (and sometimes still is) to find my own definition of success and allow myself to embrace my creativity. Read more>>

Anna Telfer | Actor, Singer, & Event Planner

My ill-spoken meaning, however, was that pursuing creativity allows me to process the cognitive and emotional dissonances of daily life. So often, I, or we, try to put things into boxes. We have “hard” seasons, or we have “happy seasons.” We feel excited, or we feel sad. Things are bad, or things are good. But if this year has taught me anything, it’s that neat little boxes don’t allow for the nuances and the complexity of growth to emerge. And those nuances are what I find so fascinating about being an actor. Creativity allows opposing emotions to both be true. And valid. People get divorces while having incredible career success. People meet the love of their life while their best friendships are ending. Babies are born while people are dying. It’s all very confusing, but it’s all very human. And I think pursuing an artistic career is the constant search for those dissonances and constantly yelling into the void, “MY LIFE DOESN”T MAKE SENSE. DOES YOURS?” And hoping others yell back “OH THANK GOD, MINE DOESN’T EITHER.” Read more>>

Thomas Rojo | Producer/Engineer & Studio Owner&Operator

The reason why I choose a career in the arts… Well to be completely honest, nothing else made sense to me. I was always a musician growing up, my dad gifted me my first guitar at 6 years of age. So music was my first love. As I got older… I knew even if I had nothing but music, I’d be happy. So I took the Plunge. Most artists/creatives run into a moment in their life where they have to choose between struggling doing what you love, or keeping a secure job/situation. There is a beauty to the former choice that still drives me today. When you first start your personal endeavor to follow your dreams, or even simply do what you want… Theres a time where being uncomfortable is forced upon you. I learned to love this period. its what pushes me to do more… Today the struggle is a lot less apparent for me but i’ll still put myself in situations I may not be ready for to force me to get to the next place in this crazy thing we call lifE. Read more>>

Jon Bass | Cinematographer & Editor

Way back when, I had to choose between becoming an English teacher or pursuing the vague beast of the “film world” and whatever that meant. I broke it down to pros and cons but that didn’t exactly lead to a decision – what actually led to diving in deep was realizing the way that I was talking; literally the language of the words on the paper of “pros vs. cons” between the two were drastically different. It’s as if my tone in writing changed, in thinking of them; both good & bad. I could see that although vague, unclear, and broad -> I viewed pursuing a creative career as the adventure before me and my life. I eventually equated it with my first “rising action” decision that sets a character on their journey in the dramatic structure of stories. Read more>>

Matt & Chris Drake | Twin Brother Electronic Music Production Duo

We both grew up taking piano lessons starting in second grade through early high school (shoutout our awesome piano teacher Juanita Bosee!) and it became one of our favorite hobbies. Then in early high school we discovered SoundCloud, which at the time was the main discovery platform for up-and-coming artists. At the time a lot of dance artists were uploading unofficial remixes to try and get discovered, and we started listening to remixes by artists like Kygo, Gryffin, Illenium, Vanic, and more. Dance music was totally new to us at the time and we thought it was super cool how artists could produce full tracks with just a computer and a midi-keyboard. Given our piano background, we began experimenting with making our own remixes by downloading acapellas off the internet and producing tracks around them. We quickly fell in love with the process of producing and songwriting, and it became not just a creative outlet for us but something we had a passion for and could see ourselves potentially pursuing down the line. Read more>>

Michael Vaughn Hernandez | Director & Story Developer

I grew up an academic, from the IB program to pre-med at Florida State. But the most I’ve learned in life has been through film. This is an art form that allows us to experience information in a way you can’t get from words or diagnostics. It’s a uniquely shared experience everyone in the audience goes through, one that results in perspectives learned and emotions expressed that may not have been otherwise communally understood. Read more>>

Sarah Elizabeth Helt | Yoga & Mediation Facilitator

For me there wasn’t any other option other than creative endeavors. I have always been a very conscious observer of human behavior & body language. As a child I would color and draw and dance and sing all the time. While my parents were generally supportive of my creative energy, there were many times when I was told to be quiet or to be still. When you become an adult, guess what? You get to be and do and express yourself however you want! I have been obsessed with the body as an instrument since my youth as a performing arts participant. Instruments inspire movement, transformation, stability, change; learning how to refine movements in the gross body effect the way we feel about ourselves on the inside. I think I became a creative because we each need a method tuning our instruments. There are different apparatuses for individual instruments, and it’s the same for people. Sometimes you need an internal revolution of sorts. If we can recognize that we are not separate from the mind or the body, that, in fact, the body is the mind and visa versa we can stop repressing and suppressing integral feelings that support our personal and global transformation. Read more>>

Claudia Rezir | A&R / Marketer / Management / Creative Entrepreneur

I decided to pursue a creative career because I wanted to work with Artists making meaningful Art. I understand how therapeutic and how valuable ART is.
I wanted my life’s mission to be centered around making sure Artists and their Art-form can find everlasting success.
I wanted the inner child within myself and within the creative beings I meet and work with to live forever in the form of Music, Music Videos, Photos, Artwork etc,,, We often forget how therapeutic art is (in all its forms) and how good it is for the soul. We often forget the healing properties music has. Have you ever been discouraged, upset or anxious about something in your life? The right song, the right message, the right art-form can completely transform your energy and thought process. The right art form in practice can reignite a lot of motivation, passion and energy within a person. And I think the re-ignition of the right energy is what the world needs right now. I knew all of these things very early on in my life and that is why I decided to pursue a creative career. Read more>>

Crystal Weintrub | Co-owner of 1802 Roasters/Avante-Garde Stan

I am a creative at heart. I’ve always been drawn to creative activities. Initially in my career I wanted to be a designer; I liked art but I also liked science and eventually I realized I didn’t think they should be treated as mutually exclusive of each other, because they’re not, and we limit ourselves but applying this thought process. Plenty of overlap exists between the two concepts and I’ve been able to chose paths that allow me use both and apply both to my work. When it comes to coffee there’s plenty of room to do that, from the scientific alchemy of creating “the perfect cup,” to creating a functional but welcoming space to be in. There are many nuances that go into making that “perfect” cup: sourcing good beans, roasting coffee, and tasting the brew. I’ve likened it to the mastery that a chef or mixologist bestows on the various food and drinks they make – their work. Making a cup of coffee is its own form of both art and science; there are many steps along the way that allow room to produce a much different end result. Read more>>

Keary (Honestly Khari) Johns | Musician and MSW

The freedom I found in making music helped me become a professional. The benefits to my mental health has been amazing. And it’s helped me obtain over 40,000 streams on my first project so I’m extremely happy. Read more>>

Cindy Bonaparte | Healing Practice Artist & Womb Doula

I felt called into it. For a long time I never saw it as a career option. My creative talents were only nurtured as a nice hobby rather than a career to support my life with. I started to look at art and creativity as inseparable from my healing practice the more I leaned into womb healing medicine. More people relate to me through my work as a Womb Healing practitioner and Reiki healer, rather than as a visual artist with organizing tendencies. Creativity and artistic expression have always been a part of my life since I could remember. I’m at a place in my life that I feel the best thing I can do for myself and my community, is to pursue a creative life. I can be an artist working with energy in a healing practice, teaching, or making objects. The why comes down to a dedication to finding purpose in healing work and creativity as decolonial work. Read more>>

Aishwarya Oli | Singer

My life used to swing up ‘n’ down like a rollercoaster when I was a high school kid (especially during my teens). Everyday homework, studies etc. started to become kind of difficult balancing between my craft. There used to be times when I wasn’t able to give myself time to practice my craft or just being me, at all. Between those sheets of paper, somewhere I was lost. I felt the need to express my feelings, not through a piece of pen, but through a “Voice”. I felt that routine and studies were persistently nagging me that I’m feeling burdened and forced to continue study something that I never enjoyed. I was trying not to accept the fact, but I eventually I did. Plunged and bemused as to what to really do in life. Hence, a time came, when I finally chose to pursue my course of life in “Music”. I had it enough! As a singer, I am much more flexible, optimistic and expressive in sharing my feelings, concerns, stories, etc much creatively. Read more>>

Chase Offerle | Actor/Writer/Director

I am an actor and writer. When I was young, I was alone a lot. My mother was a single mother who worked day and night to provide the best life she could for me and my father was not in the picture. I was alone a lot. So I watched movies and television and read. Activities I could do alone that didn’t cost much money. Through reading those stories and seeing the life of characters I came to understand myself better. It’s humanizing. Acting is humanizing. It is very specific in that way. It asks you to become more human and more connected and empathetic in a world that tries to beat that out of us every day. Read more>>