We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yenis Monterrey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Yenis , thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

Honestly? It was never a straight line and I think that’s exactly what makes my story worth telling.

I started as an attorney. A trilingual one English, Spanish, Italian trained to argue, analyze, and advocate. Law gave me discipline, precision, and a voice that commanded rooms. But somewhere between the briefs and the boardrooms, I realized I was built for something bigger than a courtroom. I was built for culture.

The transition into entertainment journalism and content creation didn’t happen overnight. It happened in layers. First, going to college again and earn a new degree, then came the press credentials covering Formula 1 at Circuit of the Americas for seven consecutive seasons with paddock access, walking major film festival circuits like SXSW, Tribeca, Sundance, and the Austin Film Festival. I was doing what most people dream about, but I was doing it as a credentialed journalist, not a fan with a phone.

The full-time pivot into creative work and brand partnerships came around 2020, when I made a conscious decision to stop splitting my identity and go all in. Could I have moved faster? Knowing what I know now absolutely. I would have monetized my authority earlier and stopped treating my expertise like a hobby. The attorney in me was cautious. The journalist in me was always ready.

What made it real was treating my platform like a business from day one of that decision with rate cards, media kits, editorial standards, and a clear niche. Credentialed authority in wellness, culture, and lifestyle. That’s not an influencer play. That’s a media brand.

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 background and context?

I’m a former attorney, a multilingual entertainment journalist, a lifestyle influencer, an actress, a community builder and in 2026, I am unapologetically a wellness architect.

I was born in Venezuela and I built my career in the United States for 25 years after finding my true love, and I have spent the last decades existing at the intersection of media, culture, and now longevity. I hold press credentials across seven seasons of Formula 1 at COTA and a film festival circuit that includes Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and the Austin Film Festival, and attended Cannes Film Festival as an Actress with the film Revenge in 2013. I’m a represented actor by a prestigious Agency in TX ” The Boysen Talent I run vipdiscoveries.com as my editorial home base, and I founded ATX Small Dogs, Austin’s curated small dog social community, because community-building is in my DNA. I got a little Maltipoo called Brownie and I got inspired.

But here is what I want brands, readers, and potential partners to understand about me in 2026: wellness is not a phase for me. It is a philosophy.

I’m in the middle of a deeply personal and very public commitment to aging intentionally from the inside out. That means hormonal optimization through partnerships with Hone Health, which has been transformational in helping me understand what my body actually needs at this stage of my life. It means metabolic and weight wellness support through Noom, because sustainable health is behavioral, not just biological. And it means confidence the kind that lives in your body, not just your mindset through IVY RX, where my code 50YENIS gets people $50 off, because I believe access to confidence should not be a luxury.

What sets me apart? I bring legal precision, journalistic rigor, and lived experience to every partnership I take on. I do not post products I do not believe in. I do not align with brands that do not align with my values. And I speak to an audience that has followed me across multiple reinventions which means they trust me. That trust is not for sale. It is earned. And brands that partner with me are borrowing that trust.

I am most proud of the fact that I was advocating for Latina representation in Hollywood and wellness spaces before it was a trend. I was in those rooms at Sundance, in the paddock, on the red carpet when it was still rare to see someone who looked like me holding a microphone with the same authority as anyone else. That is my legacy in progress. I’m getting booked more than ever for brands, partnerships and acting roles.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Three things: credibility, consistency, and cultural timing.

My legal background means I approach every story, every brand deal, and every piece of content with a level of scrutiny that most influencers simply do not apply. I read contracts. I understand FTC guidelines. I know the difference between a brand that wants reach and a brand that wants results.

My journalism credentials mean I have editorial standards. I was covering Formula 1 paddock culture and Sundance film premieres at a time when most lifestyle creators were still figuring out their aesthetic. That kind of access creates a gravitational pull people follow you because you take them somewhere they cannot go alone.

And the wellness pivot? That was cultural timing done right. I began talking about hormonal health, longevity, GLP-1 science, and the intersection of mental and physical aging before it reached mainstream saturation. My @yenismonterrey content vertical on Instagram and TikTok which feeds directly into vipdiscoveries.com exists because I saw that conversation coming and I wanted to lead it, not follow it.

Reputation is built in the compound interest of showing up at the right places, saying the right things, and never compromising your standards for a quick check. I have left money on the table to protect my credibility. And every time I did, something better came along.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Let me be transparent about something most people in this space never say out loud: I was not born an influencer. I was born a journalist. And for years, that distinction mattered deeply to me.

I worked behind the scenes. I was the one with the press credential, the recorder, the deadline. At the F1 paddock at Circuit of the Americas, I was not there for the content I was there for the story. At Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, the Austin Film Festival . I was in panels, conducting interviews, building editorial narratives. I was a journalist in the classical sense. Rigorous. Invisible by design. The work spoke, not the persona.

And then I watched something shift in real time.

I remember sitting in festival panels, the kind where industry veterans gather to dissect where media is going and the conversation kept circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: journalists were losing their jobs to influencers. Not because the journalism was bad. But because the algorithm did not care about bylines. It cared about faces, followings, and conversion rates. Brands that once sponsored editorial coverage were redirecting those budgets to creators with engaged audiences. The economics were undeniable. Influencers were earning multiples of what seasoned journalists made, and they were doing it with a phone and a point of view.

I did not resist that reality. I studied it. And then I stepped into it.

The transition was not about abandoning my journalistic standards, it was about weaponizing them inside a new medium. I brought editorial precision to content creation. I brought paddock-level access to brand storytelling. I brought a former attorney’s eye for partnership agreements into an industry where most creators sign anything put in front of them.

And here is what I did not expect: the reward of making brands genuinely happy with the work. Not just delivering posts, delivering results. Clicks. Sales. Exposure. Storytelling that converts. In 2026, the algorithm is brutally competitive. Organic reach is not given, it is earned, engineered, and fought for daily. When a brand comes back for a second campaign, when the affiliate links perform, when the comment section fills with people saying “I just ordered this because of you” that is the creative reward no journalism award ever gave me.

But the deeper reward? The human one.

I have dealt with things that do not make it into press kits. Dysfunctional family dynamics that would exhaust most people. Health challenges that forced me to rebuild from the inside, hormonally, mentally, physically. The kind of aging that happens overnight when your nervous system has been running on survival mode for too long. I know what it feels like to look in the mirror and not recognize yourself not because of time, but because of stress, loss, and the weight of holding everything together.

That is why my 2026 partnerships are not random. They are intentional extensions of my own healing.

Hone Health gave me a framework to understand my hormones and reclaim my energy. IVY RX with my code 50YENIS for $50 off helped me rebuild confidence in my body at a stage of life when too many women are told to simply accept decline. Noom gave me behavioral tools to approach wellness as a long game, not a crash diet. These are not sponsorships I accepted for the check. These are brands I brought into my life because they worked and then I brought them to my audience because that is what integrity looks like in the creator economy.

I want to inspire people who are quietly carrying what I have carried. The woman managing a difficult family situation while trying to show up professionally. The person facing a health diagnosis who still has dreams they have not given up on. The creative who watched their industry shrink and had to reinvent without a roadmap.

That is my people. And that is my purpose.

The most rewarding part of being a creative in 2026 is knowing that the life I am building in public, imperfectly, honestly, strategically is giving someone else permission to build theirs.

The clicks matter. The conversions matter. The algorithm matters. But the message underneath all of it? That you can reinvent yourself at any age, in any season, and come out more powerful than you arrived.

That is the vibe I am here to attract. And the vibe I refuse to let go.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vipdiscoveries.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yenismonterrey/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yenismonterreyblog/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yenis-monterrey-063345147/
• Twitter: https://x.com/Foxactress
• Other: https://lnk.bio/yenismonterrey

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Image Credits

Headshots Arthur-Marroquin ( Yenis Monterrey Headshots)