Do you remember the moment you realized what you wanted to do professionally? Was it magic? Was it scary? We wanted to hear from some of the most talented artists and creatives in the community and so we asked them to tell us the story of the moment when they knew they were going to pursue a creative career path.

EleveN2wenty2

Pursuing music is something the members of EleveN2wenty2 always knew that they wanted to do as individuals. Though they had been singing together since 2011, in 2018 they booked a paying gig together. After that opportunity, more and more inquiries began to pour in and the group decided to pursue music as a group specializing in professional background vocals. Read more>>

Patricia Gagic

As a young child I was always pencil sketching. I had a fascination with drawing both dresses/costumes and faces. There was a contest in the back of a magazine in which you had to draw a similar likeness or profile and mail it them. At the age of 10, I decided to draw one and submit it for review. The response was mailed back to me a month later indicating I had talent and I should become an artist and attend their art school! Read more>>

Alexandria Sade

Like many at an early age, I always knew I had it in me naturally when I started out in performing arts. I was so advanced, skipping beginner level classes across many genres and techniques of dance. I had a visually eclectic and curious mind that I didn’t have to question that dancing challenged and gave me a yes of acceptance as a very shy human-being. I didn’t need to talk to be understood, but practice the craft to communicate my expressions and movements to music that was enough for me. Read more>>

MarDe Brooks

My dream started at a very early age. Some of my first memories as a child are sitting in an old mill house with my grandfather and his friends watching them play and swap instruments in a circle. I remember everyone in the room smiling and being so happy. As grew older and spent countless hours with my dad’s vinyl collection, there was no doubt what I wanted to be when I “grew up”. I got my first guitar for Christmas when I was 12 or 13. I wasn’t a prodigy but I loved it. Read more>>

Ben Brooks

I was young, maybe 4 or 5 when I first got that feeling inside that hearing a really good song gives you. You know the one where the hairs stand up on your arms and the back of your neck. To this day that feeling is the only real meter that I have in deciding whether a song is good or bad and is also the only reason I’m still writing songs and performing them today. Read more>>

Stefan Mr. Ea$t” Laugman”

I started out selling beats in Atlanta, GA. Since the pandemic, I am now focusing on putting back out old music, producing new music, and creating content on social media. I like to focus on creativity and having a balanced chakra. I love the color orange. Read more>>

Hallie Driskell

The first time I knew I wanted to pursue fashion design was when I started high school, I would customize and style my outfits everyday! Even before high school I always had a love for fashion, as a kid I would take old clothes and recycle and turn them into something new. I would even sell shirts in school or customize my friends clothes. At this time I did not want to be a fashion designer, I was just doing what I loved. Read more>>

Stu Basham

It started when I got a cheap kid’s keyboard for Christmas one year at age 4 or 5 I think and taught myself how to play a couple songs. I started falling in love with playing music and more specifically writing my own songs and finding my own voice. Read more>>

Kai Casey

I knew that I wanted to be in music when I watched Linkin Park perform on my tv when I was 10 in my parents house. Seeing how the band was interacting with the crowd and watching how people were so in awe of what they were doing wanted to push me to learn music Read more>>

Darius Bagwell

I knew a few years ago I wanted to start a podcast. I wanted to bring something different to the podcast world and not stick to just one topic. I got the idea to start a podcast when I was at friend’s house to watch a fight and afterwards we started talking about different topics while having a drink and then it just popped into my head. I came up with the title Drinking After Dark and after some planning, I released my first episode over a year ago and it’s been a fun ride ever since. Read more>>

Nicole Hentges

I am not a life-long professional artist and never went to formal art school. In fact, I don’t recall even taking an art class in high school. I loved drawing, painting and making art as a kid, but sadly that dissipated over time as I grew up. In college, I was on the full-speed-ahead path into a career of nursing with my blinders on to distractions along the way. Read more>>

Patricia Mitchell

Since I was a child I loved to draw, paint and color as most kids do but I never outgrew that feeling. It actually continued to grow & expand. As a teen I looked at just about everything as a blank canvas that needed to be beautified. I began with my bedroom armoire. It was a beautiful waterfall mahogany veneer piece of furniture that I decided it needed my artful vision painted on it. However, my parents were not impressed. Read more>>

Sarah Forster

I don’t think I ever would have pursued selling my art as my full time job if it weren’t for COVID19. I know that may be crazy to say, because a lot of negative things came from the pandemic. But for creatives like myself, quarantine and then my temporary furlough, were a blessing. I was working a part time job at a retail store at the time; living paycheck to paycheck and not finding a ton of joy or fulfillment. Read more>>

Big Rez

I wrote my first rap at the age of 8. I’ve always been a fan of hip-hop & black media as a whole. I used to tell my friends when I was in middle school,” one day I’m going to be on 106 & park.” I was influenced by seeing kids a few years older than me on tv. I tell people all the time that Bow Wow was one of my first influences. As time went on, Unfortunately, I started focusing more on football, and my love for music was put on the back burner. Read more>>

Goliath Oboyo

I came to the realization that I wanted to work in the creative industry because I wanted to use my experiences working in corporate America to impart practical information to my community. As a result, I established Addition Podcast, an educational platform with the mission assisting the upcoming generation of black and minority people by supplying them with knowledge from professionals across a range of industries, including entrepreneurs, athletes, models, artists, content creators, authors, managers, designers, healthcare providers, and more. Read more>>

Angel Bee

I always had an affinity for vibrant colors & animated media ever since I was very young. As a child, I would always watch classic media from the golden age of animation up to the time cartoons were airing on 90’s TV all while looking at the beautiful illustrations I would find in children’s books & Lisa Frank merchandise. Even video games like those from franchises such as SEGA’s ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ series and Nintendo’s ‘Kirby’ series really captivated me due to their colorful, imaginative aesthetics. Read more>>

Naeema Bacchus

Though I’ve been painting with my mom’s food coloring since I was three (as I didn’t have a paint set until I was a teen), it was when I was fifteen that I knew painting was my path. At that time, painting was one of the few things that brought me solace and peace during those challenging teenage years. Read more>>

Kendall Doub

My love for creating started at a very young age before even knowing what an artist was. I have loved drawing and doodling since I was a small child learning to write and read. This love only grew throughout my school years. In middle school I would draw things requested for classmates and they would pay me with lunch money… I remember thinking, Wow! I could do this as a career! So early school was definitely the first time I knew I wanted to pursue art and design professionally. Read more>>

Bex Wilkinson

I had studied art in my younger years. I worked on being a painter after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. I lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and had a studio in an artist’s cooperative called “The Button Factory.” These were mostly people working in a creative profession. From there I went to study as an adjunct student to increase my technical skills at both The Art Institute of Chicago and Rhode Island School of Design. Read more>>

Ernie Garcia

I grew up in the west Texas town of El Paso. I developed an interest in music via my uncle. He was a huge music fan. I stared playing guitar at about 12 and was in bands by the time I was about 16. I considered it a really fun hobby until I moved to Austin, TX in 1993. Wow. I had never seen such a vibrant music scene before. Read more>>

Carson McKinnon

I think film has always been my first memory and my first love. My first memories are watching movies as a 2 year old with my grandpa, staying up late during a cousins sleepover when I was 3 to watch Gremlins, seeing Mars Attacks flip on the screen after my family fell asleep in front of the TV at 3, and being handed a VHS copy of Ghostbusters at the library when I was 3. As a kid, most of my dreams consisted of going to the library to check out a new VHS of a movie that had caught my eye previously. Read more>>

Racquel Miller

In 2018 I had the idea of creating something no one had seen that would be meaningful and useful. So I delved into designing handcrafted jewelry using paracord, copper wire jewelry, and precious stones. It was amazing what I learned in experimenting with my own techniques. Than 2020 hit and my love for jewelry making diminished. Read more>>

Holly Feldt

I can’t remember a time that I didn’t want to pursue a creative career. I started crafting and creating at a very young age. I remember sitting at the dining room table with my mom from a very young age creating all the fun and beautiful things. The urge to do that for a living never really ended. Read more>>

L.Von” Johnson”

I knew I wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally when I was in middle school, where I began singing in the choir, writing songs and short stories. I started to believe that I could pursue a creative/artistic path in writing, after I received a scholarship for writing an essay explaining what education meant to me. It was in college that I got serious in my pursuit of writing. I entered into several contests through The Writer’s Guild of America, of which I I didn’t win, but they acknowledged me and made me feel as if I could be a writer. Read more>>

Jeanne Hourez

I started the piano when I was 6 years old and really loved it from the very beginning. My mother is a music teacher so we would listen to a lot of classical music at home, we would go to concerts, see operas, and any kind of musical related projects. As a young pianist, I was very lucky to grew up in a healthy environment: piano became serious very quickly, but I always had a choice to stop if I wanted and my teacher was a very kind person. I remember telling her, when I was about 9 or 10: Read more>>

Kwadwo Adae

I’ve been drawing and painting since I was 7 but, I actually did attempt to be a normal person once. I spent 2 years working at an insurance company in a laughably futile attempt to pay down some of the astronomical student loan debt I accrued from college. It was awful, hour long daily commute in traffic jams; repetitive, unfulfilling, and mundane billing and customer service based computer work. I was absolutely miserable and hopelessly depressed in this corporate nightmare. Read more>>

Patrick Edwards

To some extent, I have always known this is what I wanted to do, however, there were very specific circumstances that got me to the point of resolving to make a real go at a writing career. I started college intending to major in art and creative writing, but then I got scared. There is no other way to phrase it. I got scared, and I decided to pursue a more “practical” career in corporate America. Read more>>

De’Asia J.

I can remember a moment I had in the second grade, particularly, when I decided, “ I am absolutely not going to work an office job, sitting in a cubicle all day.” This was the very early 2000’s so that’s what I was seeing on TV. I can’t remember what sparked the idea however now that I think about it, everything I’ve ever wanted to be was entertainment/Artistic/Creative: Actress, Dancer, Rapper, Producer, Talent Scout, Fashion Designer, even a Hype-man lol all before I was age to work. Read more>>