Do you remember the moment you realized what you wanted to do professionally? Was it magic? Was it scary? We wanted to hear from some of the most talented artists and creatives in the community and so we asked them to tell us the story of the moment when they knew they were going to pursue a creative career path.

Kamogelo Ramalepe

I think I was 4 years old , my grandfather used to play guitar and sing to us (me and my cousins) , so whenever he left the house I’d steal the guitar trying to play it and sing like him , that’s where I first got involved music, which led me to joining the school choir at age 7 , but then quit the choir after losing my voice the day before the choir competitions. It wasn’t until 2010 when my friend played an Eminem song for me titled ‘No Love’ from his recovery album , that’s when I knew this is what I wanted to do , so I started freestyling at school with friends until I eventually got to record my first single in 2015 which unexpectedly gained me popularity around my township. Read more>>

Greg Thomas

It sounds cliche, but I joke that photography is my first love. I was so lucky to have a close cousin who was a travel agent, and she took me on test trips for her travel agency. One trip was to Morocco when I was 14, and that’s the first time I saw a working photographer – Peter Halmagyi. During the whole trip, I was fascinated by the way he worked and interacted with people … to this day I have never seen any of those photographs, but he was the spark that lit the flame of desire. Read more>>

Clayton Mullen

The moment I knew I wanted to pursue music more seriously came just a few months before I moved to Nashville, Tennessee. I was interviewing for jobs around Dallas for after college graduation and at the same time, I got my first publishing deal offer. Before that, I didn’t realize there was a real path to making a living in music. It was a mix of realizing I didn’t want a desk job and falling deeper in love with songwriting. I always knew I had a passion for music, but I never imagined I could pursue it professionally. It wasn’t until the publishing deal opportunity that it started to feel real and I knew then I had to chase it. Read more>>

Ashley Jordan

I’ve known since I was very young, probably around age 11, that I wanted to pursue my career as an artist and musician. I’m sure that sounds like a very “dreamer/head in the clouds” type of statement to most, but to other creatives like me…when you know, you just know. I was perhaps a little too intense about it, but I don’t really know any other way. I’m all in or I’m all out, as they say. Music helped me get through some pretty unimaginable times growing up and being in the public school system. I think being so sure of my passion, purpose, and goals turned off other kids my age because they couldn’t understand it (or me). Read more>>

Olivia Jacobs

I got my first Canon camera in 2015 to capture moments on adventures with my boyfriend at the time.

As the years went on, I started bringing my camera to more places and capturing more things.

It wasn’t until 2017 that I captured a photo of our horses running through the snow that I decided to release my first limited edition photograph on canvas. Read more>>

Alexandre Di Pasquale

I first knew I wanted to pursue music professionally back in high school. I started playing drums when I was 14, and from the beginning I threw myself fully into it. Teaching myself how to read and write music and playing with several local bands. Those years gave me the spark that confirmed this was more than just a passion. Read more>>

Juliana DiChiara

I’ve been a creative person since I was young; one of my earliest creative memories was drawing a lot of paper dolls, stuffed with tissues and sealed with tape. Despite my mom eventually hiding the tape from me, I was always encouraged to draw, paint and explore stories through books and video games. In high school I was introduced to a video game called “League of Legends” by Riot Games, which featured alternate character illustrations that players could select that best represented them. It was the first time I witnessed people interested in art simply for art’s sake and from that moment on everything I did was in pursuit of becoming a Riot illustrator. Read more>>

Kenchen Bharwani

My start wasn’t in a glamorous fashion house, it was in a small, women-owned garment trading and export company. They carried a treasure trove of well-known brands, sourced directly from the very manufacturers who needed help selling off their excess merchandise due to cancellations from the brands because of delayed deliveries, or something as simple as the hang tags being placed in the wrong spot. Note that these garments are brand new in pristine condition just like what you see in stores. Read more>>

Lesley Neely

As an only child, music became my very best friend. With no siblings to play with, I spent hours with my record player and a small stack of gospel and R&B vinyls. I used to read the liner notes over and over, studying the names of singers and musicians. I dreamed of one day seeing my name printed there too. Read more>>

Caitlyn Schantzenbach

I actually came to photography through an unexpected and deeply personal moment. By trade, I’m a nurse, but by passion I’ve always had a creative eye. Years ago, at a family gathering, I snapped a picture of my dad without realizing it would later become the very photo used at his funeral. That single image now hangs on the walls of my siblings, my grandparents, my aunts and friends — it became the way we all hold on to him. That experience lit a fire in me. It showed me how powerful it is to document the ordinary days, because you never know when they become the moments that matter most. Read more>>

Jesse Fairfax

Creativity has always been genetic for me. My mom and dad are respectively a photographer and a musician who still practice their crafts past retiring from their day jobs. By the time I was a teenager, I was obsessive about the Hip-Hop culture my dad introduced me to in the early ’80s. On top of reading magazines like The Source and XXL, watching Yo! MTV Raps and BET’s Rap City, I spent practically every Friday and Saturday evening listening to New York radio at a time many still consider Hip-Hop’s pinnacle. Read more>>

Antonio Chee

I wanted to pursue this creative and artistic path since I was in primary school. I want to say around the 2nd or 3rd grade. My class was asked to draw for a build board. The artwork had to do something with “buckle up” or “seat belts”. We were split into 3 person teams. Our team’s artwork was one of the chosen ones. That feeling of our artwork being chosen stuck with me. At the time I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was they really liked our artwork. Read more>>

Luhren

I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist. I remember being a kid growing up going to high school and telling the adults around me I wanted to pursue art, I remember them telling me that I need to be more practical to pick a real job because you’ll always be struggling. I refuse to accept that as an answer for my goals and my dreams and 15 years later I’m still actively pursuing my creative ambitions. I believe that I’m supposed to use my creative thought process to do something bigger than myself, what that thing is? I have no clue I’m just enjoying the process and learning everything I can along the way. Read more>>

Hamilton Hardin

I started playing music when I was 4 years old, but I didn’t feel the call to artistry until my late teens. I really started digging into creating original music, with purpose. Read more>>

Abigail Swint

I had always been interested in the arts, and loved creating stories and characters and bringing them to life on the page. I had been doing it for as long as I remembered. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I came to the decisions to pursue it professionally, however. As a kid, I loved watching The Lord of the Rings movies with my dad, and we always liked to see the behind-the-scenes work that it took to bring Middle Earth to life. When I realized that all of the things I loved so much about the movies–the sets, props, designs, architecture, and creatures–were all hand drawn and created by two incredibly talented artists, John Howe and Alan Lee, something clicked. I knew then I wanted to do that, to spend my days creating worlds and building things on something as simple as a piece of paper. Read more>>

Amelia Salmon

I first knew I wanted to pursue a creative path professionally during the 2020 lockdown. At the time, I was in the middle of my university degree, but when everything shut down, I found myself at home with more stillness and time than I was used to. That pause became a catalyst. I started painting, experimenting with beads, and making hand-painted wooden earrings. It felt natural, almost like I was reconnecting with a part of myself I hadn’t fully honored before. Read more>>

Chris Cisneros

The first time I knew I wanted to DJ and produce professionally was when I got my first DJ board at 13 years old. The feeling of mixing music and truly connecting with it was unexplainable. Growing up around electronic music my whole life finally came together in that moment. Once I realized how much I loved DJing, I knew the next step was producing my own music and that’s when I started making tracks. Read more>>

Emre Karaoglu

My journey started in Turkiye. I was born and raised in Istanbul, one of the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Istanbul is incredibly beautiful, dynamic, and vibrant. I can say I learned a lot from Istanbul. Human relationships, cultural diversity, and the constant hustle and bustle of life… Read more>>

Mia Preisser

I began as a kindergarten teacher while quietly nurturing a love for performance. At the City College of New York, CCNY, I played a stripper in a play and felt power unlike anything else. The audience loved it, my parents praised me, but my fiancé at the time was horrified. He dumped me backstage, saying I had disrespected us both. That moment planted the first seeds of doubt. His slut shaming cut deep and shadowed my early performances. I begged for his forgiveness and stopped performing for a long time. I decided to become an elementary school teacher. Read more>>

Aaron Chaz

Growing I thought I was no good at art, after failing (to myself) at duplicating a drawing my mother made of a cartoon dog.

I purposely avoided the field throughout my grade school years opting for other classes whenever possible, thus my path into art was sort of a mix between random and meant to be. Read more>>

Eddie Aka Ikon E Jones

When it comes to the entertainment business. I had a dream of doing something in the game when i was in high school. I eventually got my first opportunity to be a a&r back in troy, nc for a indy label. Which taught me the business of entertainment. Where i eventually got into artist management and club promo in orlando. Read more>>

Carvin Winans

I was around 18 when I first knew I wanted to pursue a professional career as a singer. Being the 3rd of 10 children, my parents started teaching us how to sing when I was 4yrs old. I really didn’t like it at all at that age because I was more focused on being able to play with my friends. However, my parents saw a gift in their children at a young age and wanted to make a point of nourishing that gift. At the age of 13, I started to enjoy singing but it wasn’t until I turned 18 that I realized I wanted to do it professionally and I was thankful for what my parents had taught me. Read more>>

Ransom McCafferty

My grandparents fostered my love for music. Neither of them were professional musicians, but my grandfather played piano, and my grandmother played violin. More than that, they were lovers of art and music at a level where I was constantly immersed in it when I was with them. My parents were music lovers too, but were not musicians themselves. Through my grandparents, I was first introduced to jazz, and to this day when I hear certain records it takes me back to their house as a young boy. My grandparents tell me that when I was a kid, they’d set up pots and pans for me to play on. I don’t quite remember that, but they did gift me my first drum at the age of 6. Read more>>

Juniper Rose

I think I’ve always known. I’ve always been the type of person to be very stubborn and very determine to do what I wanna do when I want to do it. It also helped me that I had a few other artists in my family, not professionally but very talented and I was always inspired by that. I’ve been drawing for my whole life, i did art classes in school, was obsessed with Bob ross. I just got my keepsakes back recently and there must’ve been 20 plus sketch books just from middle school/highschool. Before I became a hairdresser I was determined to be a makeup artist. My Instagram account was originally a makeup account and over the years I shifted my goals, I figured I could have a better career in hair. It was a scary transition because it was a whole new medium that I wasn’t very good at to begin with. I wouldn’t have it any other way now. I love my job so much. Read more>>

Santino Vitale

My father is an artist, so our house always had something creative going on in it. I’ve been told that I started drawing at a very early age so I truly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t being creative. But I do remember that when I was around four years old, my father showed me Ray Harryhausen’s ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ on VHS. The moment I saw the cyclops rampage out of the cave and roar at the camera, I knew I had just seen something special — but I didn’t fully understand what it was. At least, not yet. Within that same year, my father dug out the family video camera and showed me how stop-motion animation worked. To say I was mesmerized would have been an understatement. From then on, I would spend every waking moment either watching or attempting to make movies. Read more>>

Julian Robertson

Well, my journey in regards to having aspirations begins my freshmen year of high school. For the majority of my life (until my junior year in college) I played basketball; and that was something I had hopes of pursing towards the professional level. However, my freshman year of high school before one of my high school basketball games, one of my friends let me listen to music on his iPod. I began listening to a Nas song called “New York State of Mind.” I probably listened to the song 10 times before the game started. Afterwards I went back and listened to his first album “illmatic.” Nas has since been my favorite rapper/MC of all time. It was at that moment that I knew being a music artist that was intentional about lyrics and quality meaning was something I wanted to pursue. Read more>>