We were lucky to catch up with Nova Nordstrom and Deviant Donna recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Nova Nordstrom and Deviant Donna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

The basis of our brand revolves around raising money for the art and music community. Many artistic spaces require the artists to jump through hoops to be compensated. They require a certain amount of attendees for the artist to bring in, have them purchase a table to show their work, etc. We are proud to give the artists a guaranteed minimum earning for each of our events, depending on the collaboration. We’ve even been the first paid gig for many of our performers and visual artists! We’ve discovered along the way that our community loves to purchase art prints, and it’s become an amazing way for the artist to not only sell their work, but put more art into peoples’ homes in an accessible way.

Nova Nordstrom and Deviant Donna, 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?

Nova: I’m a visual artist and designer, and I specialize in digital paintings and brand design. I take a lot of inspiration from poster design, and that’s were I got my start freelancing. In the past I worked on film posters, and I’ve been able to move that creativity into designing our event posters every month. Every monthly event has a new theme, and we’re able to keep our branding cohesive with the changes. It’s important to me that we show a variety of different artistic styles, and have a rotating gallery of artists as well (ranging from digital art, to oil paintings, photography, sculptures, etc.) Curating the event space gives us that opportunity – to collaborate with local artists, hear their artistic process, and build connections.

Donna: The funny part is, none of my family is musically inclined. But as I grew up, I found myself in many environments outside of my immediate family that were very musically influenced. I spent portions of my summers at Wavy Gravy’s summer camp (he was the MC at Woodstock and a clown/human rights activist in the 60’s and 70’s) which provided a pathway to my love of classic rock. When I turned 18, I worked at KZSC in Santa Cruz, which further quenched my desire for new sounds. I got really good at digging up new tunes, as well as creating playlists, and found I deeply missed the musical discourse post-pandemic so I revived my DJ name in the form of my instagram music blog. I never want to review music in a way that’s inaccessible- many journalism outlets do so already. The goal became to help anyone find their new favorite band. The format received such a positive response, it led Nova and I to put our skills together to see what else we may contribute to the scene that so openly accepted us. We know we are just at the beginning of our journey in the music space, and the driving force is to always give back, and create more opportunities for the incredibly talented people around us. We also do private parties and various events, with most of our earnings going back towards our initial goal.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We look back and think about how crazy and unlikely it was for us to find each other. We met on Bumble BFF and later found out we only live two blocks away from each other. The rest is history.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Even though we are building a business, the artists are our top priority. It is imperative for our artists and performers to feel taken care of, safe, and happy with our collaborations. Our relationships are everything, with both artists and our audience. For example, If we’re hired as bookers for external projects, the artists in our network are those that we’ll always consider first. We’ve established that relationships, and we like to see it grow and offer our artists as much support as we can, even outside of our own events.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thedeviantgroup?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
• Other: TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@thedeviantgroup?_t=8fEZmXqZzi7&_r=1