We were lucky to catch up with Kori Price recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kori, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I’ve always been proud of my ability to be a high-functioning plate spinner, able to keep my full-time product management job, art, photography side hustle, leader of an art collective, and more balanced and moving forward. It seemed like I could schedule and time manage my way through conflicting priorities and talk myself into just a few more hours of work or crossing off one more thing on the to do list to keep everything in check. For a while, all of the plates spun and stayed in the air.

As I took more interest in becoming a full time artist and writer and began to pursue more opportunities to share my work and to write, my focus became more trained on those plates and the others began to falter. The balancing act was getting harder and harder to keep up and I regularly traded hours to work for hours of sleep that I would make up for in ounces of coffee. I wasn’t willing to admit that the hustle was unsustainable because I didn’t see any other viable option. If I wanted to be a full time artist and writer and live comfortably I was going to have to work twice as hard to replace the income my full-time job provided me with. Taking a leap of faith and quitting my full-time job had a long list of requirements that I determined would give me the best chance of success. It was my exit plan and I’d given myself five years to complete it.

Turns out, I wouldn’t have five years.

At the end of January this year, my position was eliminated and I was laid-off effective immediately. Shock was the first emotion I felt and fear followed it, but hope wasn’t far behind. Before I lost access to my work e-mail account, I rapidly typed a goodbye email to colleagues. In the message I said that sometimes these things happen for a reason and that maybe it was time for some change.

During a conversation over coffee a few days after, a friend told me, “you’re in your exit plan right now. This is the exit plan.” She was right. I didn’t need to immediately find another full-time job. I didn’t need to wait until I had every item checked off of my exit plan list. I was ready. The time to take the leap of faith was now. As a risk-averse, have-a-plan-for-everything kind of person, taking the leap is probably one of the craziest things I’ve ever done, but, surprisingly, I’m not afraid. The past 10 years that I spent spinning plates were all years of training for this moment. Discovering that I wanted to be an artist and needed to create art gave me the perspective on my life that I was missing. Seeking therapy helped improve mental health and taught me how to listen to myself. Shifting from engineering and marketing roles to product management helped me learn about business strategy, market research, and roadmapping. Co-founding an artist collective and working as a photographer for different organizations and individuals in the community allowed me to form friendships and connections. I’d done all of the prep work. I just needed a nudge to get outside of my comfort zone and let my focus be solely trained on my work as a creative.

Kori, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a multidisciplinary artist, primarily making photographs, written works, and fiber-based weavings to create and explore opportunities where contrasting or diverging subjects can exist or interplay. My written works are majority prose based. My photography often utilizes, or is otherwise inspired by, double or multiple exposure techniques and my weavings are often made of non-traditional fibers, such as synthetic Black hair and adornments.

My work as an artist and my formal training as an electrical engineer diverge. I consistently live in and create in a “grey” area nestled between what should be black or white, right-brained or left-brained, or cut and dry. In this between-space, I converge and contort notions about the Black experience, Black womanhood, legacy, space, and time to translate them into visual and written works. I aim to create pieces and exhibit work that deliver a simultaneous contrast of emotions and imbue a sense that we can be more than what’s simplistic and easy to understand or ignore.

I’ve always been creative and interested in multiple art forms. Music and reading were my first art loves. I played the clarinet and contra-alto clarinet throughout twelve years of band from elementary school to college and loved writing stories as a child where names of people and planets were often unpronounceable, consonant-only made-up words. I found my second art love, photography, during a middle school art club. The first camera I ever shot with was an early digital camera where the images were stored on a floppy disk. A few years later, my Dad bought a Sony Cybershot point-and-shoot and I think I used it more than he did. I took photos of everything around me and loved sharing and comparing them with friends who also enjoyed photography.

College is where my interest in both writing and photography grew and expanded. Alongside my electrical engineering major, I took creative classes and enrolled in band throughout college. However, I didn’t see myself as an artist, nor allowed myself to consider art as something outside of a hobby.

My art practice has evolved and has become a much larger part of my life in the last four years. Surprisingly, as we were all isolated during the pandemic, my connection with my local art community expanded. I’ve started to see the whole of my being (electrical engineering background and previous corporate career included) as creative. As much as photography, writing, and weaving are creative mediums, so is my technical experience. I currently have many projects and ideas in the works that run the gamut from starting to sell fine art photography prints, completing a fantasy novel where the magic system is informed by my engineering background, and working on a new set of photographs about family legacy.

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

I often worked late nights early on in my career as an engineer. I was a part of an engineering leadership development program and wanted to make sure that I took advantage of the opportunity to accelerate my career and prove that I was a hard worker. As much as I enjoyed working with the teams I was on, visiting customer sites, and seeing the controls retrofits that I was a part of go from design to implementation, the job left me tired and drained after every day. I wanted time to work on my art, but instead found myself too tired to create after work. In addition to working, I had started my Master’s in Electrical Engineering and had to work on homework and design projects after work. By the end of the first class, I was beyond frustrated. I wasn’t getting the time to create like I wanted to. It felt like everything I was working on was to please someone else or because I thought it’s what a young engineer should do. I’d been so focused on the prescribed path that I thought I should be on, that I didn’t stop to question why until I got to a breaking point. I didn’t want to spend another year and a half putting my art aside, so I quit my master’s program. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Around that same time, I also made the decision to find a less technical role so that the work would require less critical thinking and leave me less mentally drained after work. I tried project management, marketing, and sales enablement roles over the next several years and finally found the right fit in product management. It was the right mix of challenging enough to peak my interest and didn’t always require the deep thinking that I needed for engineering. Often, I had enough steam left in the tank after work to pursue my art and I was learning important business strategy skills that have started to pay off as I enter this my next era as a full time creative. Changing my career path and pivoting from the prescribed path of engineering leadership that I thought I should be on helped me get better aligned with my creative passions and helped me start to live a life centered around joy instead of what I thought success looked like.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think it’s important to pay attention to local school systems and local governments. Funding the arts, art education, and literacy is as important as other subjects and programs in school. Basic needs, such as affordable housing and healthcare, impact artists and creatives as well. Staying in the loop on what local governments are doing regarding housing and zoning isn’t the most exciting thing to do, but it’s important. Folks are losing their homes, their culture, and their opportunities to grow wealth due to gentrification and other exclusionary practices.

Additionally, Visit local galleries and arts organizations and support artists. I think that sometimes folks can feel overwhelmed by art galleries or feel like they don’t belong, but that isn’t true. Art is for everyone. If possible, support an artist by buying their work or hiring them for design work or creative projects. Without proper restrictions, regulations, and respect for copyrighted material, AI products and AI companies could have a major hand in destroying the careers of many talented artists.

We have to protect our artist communities and make sure that new technologies, laws, and changes to systems don’t blindly eliminate our livelihood and this important part of the economy in the name of capitalism.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.koripricephotography.com/
• Instagram: @koripricephotography
• Facebook: Kori Price Photography
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kori-price/