We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jillian Katz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jillian below.

Jillian, appreciate you joining us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

I set aside everything I knew to dedicate my career to art. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

While my biological family still had a heavy influence over my life, they saw a different path for me. Clichés are such for a reason; this tale is no exception.

It was my senior year and final semester of high school. I received an offer from the Bachelor of Design program at OCADU (Ontario College of Art and Design University). My parents begged me to go to a more business-oriented university to be like the other kids: their friends’ children. We compromised: graphic design was a middle-of-the-road option. It satisfied their need for a professional title they could share with their lawyer, doctor, and investor friends, and I would still be able to “be creative”, they said. If I could make the quotations larger than words, imagine them Austin Powers-style. IYKYK. At 18, I had no idea of the skills and values I would glean from what was, at the time, a foreign industry to me.

My first career wasn’t all bad: I learned more in that decade than I have in any classroom. It was the beginning of understanding myself and engaging in discourse about diplomacy, politics, communication, honesty, and culture outside the minuscule slice I’d experienced. About people — what makes them tick, what doesn’t, and how intricate, social, individual, and similar we all are. It was through this career that something in me shifted. I was born into an impenetrable shelter, otherwise known as an insular, culturally conservative community. For the first time, I could separate myself from the sociocultural infrastructures that held said community together. I had space to breathe clean air. For this, I will always cherish my design education.

I also learned that I don’t fit into corporate environments. I tried, though, and I struggled with my mental health to the point that it nearly killed me. After surviving said “nearly killed me”, I realized my life would only improve if I followed my intuition and chose to make art unapologetically — a simple enough equation.

In August 2023, my husband and I packed up our lives (and cat, obviously) and moved from Toronto to Los Angeles — away from the binds that held us fast to the boxes we were forced into. It cost us all of our savings and then some, but we did it anyway. I traded a cozy office and cushy salary for a ~6 sq ft space in the entrance of our one-bedroom apartment: this is my new studio. It’s not much, but it’s mine, and screams “freedom” to me. More creation, joy, expression, and healing have happened here than anywhere else in the past decade.

After showing a small body of oil pastel works on paper, I began teaching myself to oil paint. I am roughly 18 months into my journey and will never look back. This dive into the unknown is the riskiest and most rewarding I have ever taken, and it’s also just the beginning.

I am assisting an artist part-time and creating my first collection of oil paintings, “Immortal Waste.” They are self-portraits on reclaimed plastic bag canvases. That’s all I’ll say about that for now. I’m deep in creation mode and cautiously excited to share more when ready!

Jillian, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Over a decade, my design practice evolved from primarily print-based and branding into systems, consulting, and service design. A small freelance practice on the side allowed me to continue meaningfully playing with editorial design, a reprieve from the monotonous, infinite drone of corporate design.

My freelance practice focuses on small business branding and editorial design. Design is a tool I wield as a service first, and a creative practice second. Perhaps that limits my creative ceiling; it allows my clients to feel heard and for their stories to shine through their brands. My job is to realize my clients’ stories, visions, and dreams, especially those who claim they “have no creative skills” (yes, you do!).

Service design, briefly, is a blend of strategic consulting, user experience design, qualitative research, and graphic design. These elements work together when faced with large-scale or elusive problems that organizations struggle to solve internally. We (hopefully) improve physical and nonphysical systems of every kind — patient education, hospital care models, government information dissemination, even insurance processing — by working with the people in and directly affected by those systems. My work is not public-facing; the outputs are information design and hyperspecific visual tools: workshops, roadmaps, and other similarly repetitive documents. When lucky, I worked with patients or underserved and underrepresented populations, such as aging Canadians. I quickly realized that design was the least interesting part of my job: I loved research. It was an honor to interact with research participants from around the globe, all with entirely different ways of being. I learned how to blend tact with empathy: journeying beside strangers whose hands you may never hold, but whose hearts are in your hands for the next 1 to 3 hours.

Although the corporate world was not the right environment for me, I don’t regret my years there. Without them, I’d understand less about people, language, and emotion. That world did a funny thing to me: it both softened and sharpened my ears, tongue, and gaze. We were told to be like chameleons and ducks: constantly adjusting to match their environments, with calm exteriors and tirelessly overworking interiors. That pendulum swings a bit too far each way; I don’t want to live in constant extremes for my work to suggest them.

With this shift, I am learning how to exist as if from scratch. I notice it in the mirror: I recognize myself for the first time. It’s startling to realize you haven’t met yourself before. It’s exhilarating when your name finally sounds like it’s yours. I maintain that creativity doesn’t pick favorites, but now I face an unexpected challenge: my heart is my client. There is an intimacy here that design never came close to offering, but research certainly did. Now, though, I am the subject. I am the client, stakeholder, chameleon, duck, and artist. In many ways, art has allowed me to reclaim my life. Now, through art, I heal festering wounds and remove old bandages. Underneath is tomorrow’s Jillian, more herself than yesterday.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m learning that imperfection makes me who I am; I guess the inverse of this is that I’m unlearning perfectionism.

Art making has been my best teacher for this: brush strokes become stories rather than blemishes to blend out. The backstory is simple and maybe a little obvious, but aren’t most lessons typically right before us waiting to be recognized?

My first oil painting is titled ‘I am Adam; I am God’. I was convinced that completeness meant realism, so it was the standard I needed to meet. It was a stressful piece to put together for all the wrong reasons. I was so focused on capturing every detail that I couldn’t enjoy the learning I’d set out to do.

As I’ve continued to paint, I’ve allowed myself to have some fun, leaving space for imperfection, and suddenly the work tells a richer story. I love proving myself wrong! Hopefully, there’s much more unlearning on this journey.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I love returning to the moment(s) I chose to (bear with me) follow my heart instead of the minds of others: leaving my design career almost entirely behind to “paint and see what happens”.

Quick refresher: life-altering mental health crisis, which I thankfully survived. What followed was a multi-year wave of meeting myself over and over for the first time. Imagine going 30-something years of your life not knowing who you are or having given thought to what dreams might be!

My attempts to integrate into office jobs were the juiciest of failures. I am not one for strict but silent social rules, murky (at best) agendas, or “performance ratings” that determine your future quality of life via impenetrable rubrics and checklists made by someone who has never done your job. Squishing all of my soft bits into the hard molds that were set out for me would literally kill me if I kept trying. I had to pivot.

It didn’t matter whether I went broke (I did) or if I had to completely change the way I operated/consumed in the world (I also did), the only thing I wanted to do was to paint. So I did.

New ways of living are scary, especially when it’s not the life you see for yourself; especially when your family sees the move as a failure for giving up or refusing to get a job. What about the money? All that promise? The stability?

I am still learning to care less about others’ opinions and to delay gratification. One step is better than none, and my life path is no longer up for debate; I am sovereign now.

Integrating the positives from my old life into the new (design as part of/in supplement to my art practice) has been difficult: I’m stubborn and was afraid to look back. Eventually, I had to recognize that to move forward meant honouring my context.

I’m still in the depths of this pivot (aren’t we all), but I have decided to enjoy the process even when it’s hard. Resources are scarce? Time to innovate. Not enough money to leave the house? More time to get to know myself. I’m blessed to be cheered on by a cute cat and a super-supportive, also-pretty-cute husband. It’s a slower life, but a more abundant one, too.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @jillianktz

Image Credits

Jaycee Alcala