Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Naiya Dudelston. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Naiya, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

The moment came quietly. Not with a bang, but a remembering.
I was mid-session, camera in hand, watching a woman soften as she saw herself through my lens, not as she thought she should be, but as she truly was. That was the spark. The divine click. The knowing that this wasn’t just photography. It was reclamation.

But the story begins much earlier, in the undercurrent of my life.

I had always been the one people came to when they felt unseen, misaligned, or ready to change everything. My gifts lived in pattern recognition, energy reading, and storytelling, not just in words, but in visuals, in frequency, in the way a woman holds her posture when she finally lets go of pretending.

Photography became the first portal. But it wasn’t enough.
Because I saw what others didn’t. I felt the identity behind the image.
And that’s where the idea for The Modern Muse™ came from:
To build a business that wasn’t a service, it was a spiritual ecosystem for women ready to be seen.

I didn’t want to just “take brand photos” or “offer coaching.” I wanted to translate women’s energy into form, into visuals, words, rituals, and strategies that made their soul marketable without distortion.

I layered in my tools:
• Human Design.
• Astrology.
• Voice channeling.
• Branding psychology.
• Lived experience.
• A deep desire to restore women to themselves.

And the logic? It wasn’t all intuition. I knew this could work because I was my own first case study.
I knew how to build something from soul and still make it sell. I’d already done it, multiple times.
I saw the gaps in the market: too many coaches selling strategies without soul, too many photographers giving women someone else’s aesthetic.
No one was merging it all, until I did.

So I created a methodology. A brand. A transmission. A home for every piece of me and every woman like me.

The Modern Muse™ was born not as a brand, but as a frequency.
And when you live at the intersection of identity, voice, and vision, you don’t just have a business.

You become a movement.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Absolutely! I’m Naiya Dudelston — I’m a photographer, brand strategist, spiritual life coach, and the founder of The Modern Muse™, which is really the umbrella for everything I do. It’s a soul-led, multidimensional brand built to empower women through visibility, embodiment, and aligned expression.

My work lives at the intersection of creative vision, intuitive guidance, and personal power. I started as a portrait photographer — capturing women and families — but over the years, I realized I wasn’t just taking pictures. I was helping women reclaim how they see themselves. That insight completely reshaped my business.

Now, The Modern Muse™ includes four branches:
1. Modern Muse Branding – This is my photography studio where I offer brand, empowerment, and boudoir sessions through what I call The Oracle Lens™. It’s photography rooted in astrology, Human Design, and intuitive styling. It’s personal branding that feels like soul recognition.
2. Modern Muse Oracle – This is where my channeled work lives: voice transmissions, tarot, written downloads, and eventually, my oracle and tarot decks. It’s spiritual support for women on the edge of transformation.
3. Modern Muse Method – My coaching and mentorship work. I help other intuitive creatives and entrepreneurs build soul-aligned businesses. It’s a blend of strategy, energy work, and brand clarity — designed around your unique Human Design blueprint.
4. Modern Muse Market – My newest branch — a merch line offering wearable affirmations, energetic statements, and tools for embodiment. It’s about integrating the brand’s frequency into your daily life with intention, beauty, and a bit of edge.

At the core, my mission is visibility with integrity. I help women show up as their whole selves — not just curated versions for a brand or an audience. Whether I’m behind the camera, behind a mic, or behind the scenes of someone’s launch — I’m always working to help them step fully into their essence and own it.

What sets me apart? I don’t separate the strategy from the soul. I bring both the metaphysical and the practical. My camera is a mirror, my voice is a portal, and my brand is a permission slip for women to stop playing small.

And what I’m most proud of is that people walk away from my sessions or my coaching saying, “I finally feel like I’m being seen for who I really am.” That’s the magic. That’s the whole point.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

One hundred percent. I think one of the hardest things for non-creatives to understand about the creative path, especially when it’s also spiritual and soul-led like mine, is that it’s not linear. There’s no clear ladder to climb, no obvious benchmark for “success.” It’s cyclical. It’s intuitive. And it often looks, from the outside, like we’re changing directions when really… we’re deepening.

People who thrive in traditional structures sometimes see reinvention as instability. But for me, evolution is the work. The Modern Muse™ was never a business plan I picked off a shelf, it was born out of years of becoming, grieving, healing, and reclaiming parts of myself I had to lose to find. And that process doesn’t always look productive in a conventional sense. Sometimes it looks like stillness. Or destruction. Or a rebrand every three years * laughs *because my inner world has shifted that much.

Non-creatives may also struggle to understand that creative output isn’t just something we do, it’s who we are. So when we’re not creating, we’re not breathing right. And when we’re being told to “niche down” or “pick one thing,” it can feel like cutting off circulation to the soul.

What I’ve learned is that creativity isn’t chaotic, it’s quantum. It’s multidimensional. It reveals itself in layers, and it requires a level of self-trust that goes way beyond logic. That can be terrifying for someone who relies on predictability. But for people like me? It’s how we bring new worlds into form.

So if you’re someone watching a creative in your life evolve and pivot and make things that don’t quite “make sense” to you, give them room. You might not see the whole vision yet, but I promise: they’re building something sacred, one intuitive step at a time.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Yeah… I’ve had a few defining moments, but there’s one year that really shaped the rest of my life.

In 2015, I lost my son to suicide. I moved back to my hometown. And I closed down a photography business that I had poured my heart and soul into, one that was thriving by every outside measure. I lost my child, my identity, my stability… all at once. It was a full collapse. A forced rebirth. And it cracked me wide open.

But grief has a way of introducing you to yourself in ways nothing else can. I realized I had a choice: I could shut down, or I could transmute it. I chose to rebuild, slowly, intuitively, from the inside out. And that’s really when the earliest threads of The Modern Muse™ were born, even if I didn’t know it yet. It’s been 10 years in the making.

But truthfully, that wasn’t the first time I had to rise. I lost my father to cancer in 1997. He battled alcoholism for years, trauma from the Vietnam War that never really let go of him. Watching someone you love disappear like that is its own kind of loss. That grief planted a seed in me early, an understanding that we carry ancestral pain, and we also carry the power to end cycles.

And then there’s the story that lived quietly in the background for most of my life: growing up as a mixed-race kid, with a Thai mother in small-town America. I watched her endure racism, xenophobia, and isolation with quiet grace. She taught me how to be strong without hardening, how to keep your spirit intact when the world tries to erase it.

So when people ask where my resilience comes from, it’s all of that. It’s generational. It’s soul-deep. I’ve learned how to create beauty from pain, meaning from loss, and magic from moments when it felt like everything had fallen apart. That’s why my work is what it is. I don’t just brand businesses or take pretty pictures. I hold space for women who are rising from their own ashes, because I’ve lived that fire.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://modernmusebranding.com
• Instagram:@modernmusebrand
• Facebook:  Facebook.com/modernmusebrand

Image Credits

Me: Naiya Dudelston