Advance Your Art: From Artist to Creative Entrepreneur

MEET SUZANNE SAMPLES: Suzanne Samples lives in Boone, North Carolina, where she teaches English at Appalachian State University. She received a Ph. D. in Victorian Lit from Auburn University. Recently, Suzanne has been published by Firewords, Dime Show Review, Cardinal Sins, The Gateway Review, Atlas + Alice, and Glassworks Magazine. Currently, Suzanne’s book Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild, a memo...

MEET TIHI RIZH: Tihi Rizh is a queer activist, writer, and storyteller. He currently works at Demand Progress, leading online campaigns against the overreach of government surveillance. Tihi has won consumer campaigns against Netflix, UPS, Rhode Island Lifespan Hospital, and led a coalition to remove David Koch from the Board of the Smithsonian and PBS. His non-fiction work first appeared in The S...

MEET DANIEL A DAYNO, MD Daniel A. Danyo, MD is the physician owner of North Atlanta Hair Restoration, a boutique medical practice solely dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of male and female hair loss. He is one of less than 400 physicians certified through the American Board of Hair Restoration servicing an estimated 100 million sufferers of hair loss in the US. As one of a handful of physi...

MEET TROY CHRISTOPHER PLOTA Troy Plota has been an award-winning Professional Photographer for over 30 years. His work has appeared in top magazines including Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone and many more. His advertising work has also appeared on dozens of billboards in New York’s Times Square, as well as on the Vegas strip. He has photographed dozens of celebrities like Heidi Klum, Usher, Mariah...

MEET VALORIE HUBBARD Valorie Hubbard owns the company, Actor’s Fast Track, where she consults with working actors about their career paths. Having navigated her own career, she knows the pitfalls and successes of the path and how to avoid the one and create the other. She gives actors the tools they need to get recognized. Her first book, The Actors Workbook: how to become a working actor, publish...

MEET IRINA LEONI Irina is the enthusiastic and innovative founder of Power Portraits, best known for her vibrant photographic style and personable business portraiture. She’s made it her mission to educate small business brands on harnessing the power of photography to maximize the connection with their audiences. An unceasing optimist, she immigrated to the US in pursuit of professional and perso...

Jordan Elizabeth Gelber -is an actress and entrepreneur from New York City, currently residing in Brooklyn, who has always been a lover of the performing arts–from putting on shows in her parents’ kitchen when she was a kid to playing numerous roles both onstage and off. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in 2010 with a B.A in Graphic Design and Communication Arts and has been working...

Thank you for tuning into my 100th episode! It’s been two years since I first started this and I honestly never thought it would last this long. In today’s conversation, I am joined LIVE and drinking wine with my friend Rachel Cossar. We cover a few backgrounds bits from my journey and check in with her company since I last interviewed her in early 2018. I started a Patreon Account – Please click...

MEET TORAH BONTRAGER Torah Bontrager (BON-tray-grrrr), raised Amish, grew up with no electricity and cars, and speaks English as a second language. She literally escaped in the middle of the night at age 15, with only what she could carry: the clothes on her back and $170 in her pocket. She’s the author of An Amish Girl in Manhattan: Escaping at Age 15, Breaking All the Rules, and Feeling Safe Aga...

MEET BEKAH HAWROT WEIGEL After teaching in the humanities for ten years at the college level, Bekah’s life was hit with an unexpected trauma. While dealing with PTSD and recovery, Bekah was encouraged by her husband, a developer and live-streamer for Freecodecamp, to learn to code. She found that coding helped her manage her PTSD, and she was hooked after starting Flatiron School bootcamp and find...

Peter Lang, CPA, is an accountant who specializes in the unique accounting challenges faced by artistic professionals. Designers and other artistic professionals may find that ordinary CPAs are simply unequipped for their needs, but with 16 years of tax and accounting experience under his belt, Peter is a proven expert in helping business owners in the design industry do their taxes and all the ot...

Bryan W. Mattimore is co-founder and “Chief Idea Guy” of the Growth Engine Company, www.growth-engine.com , a nineteen-year old innovation agency based in Norwalk, Connecticut. In his innovation consulting career, Bryan has facilitated over a thousand brainstorming sessions, moderated over five hundred creative focus groups, and managed over two hundred successful innovation projects, leading to o...

Julia Torgovitskaya Rapoport, President of iCadenza & CEO of Cadenza Artists, is a trained opera singer and relates first-hand to the journey that performing artists undertake on their quest to success. She has extensive consulting experience with both arts organizations and individuals with particular expertise in guiding projects from concept to impactful launch, motivation, empowerment, and...

Catherine Meyers is an Opera Singer turned Software Engineer who currently builds cool stuff with Ruby on Rails and React at Mavenlink, a professional services platform focused on resource planning and project management. Previously, she worked at Red Antler, a branding agency in Brooklyn, where she built and maintained fully responsive websites for a varied and diverse clientele. Catherine is a g...

Masha Malka has defied the odds throughout her life. Leaving the only life, and country, she had known, Masha Malka’s life turned upside down when her family fled the Soviet Union. Overcoming the struggles of being a refugee at 17 years old, living below the poverty line, wondering where her next meal would come from to decades later dealing with a very difficult break-up of a 20-years marriage, l...

Linda Souza is a tech startup marketer who has helped lead several companies to successful acquisition, merger, and IPO. Currently, Linda is vice president of marketing for Gem, an all-in-one cryptocurrency app for the next billion consumers entering the decentralized economy. Linda is also the co-founder of Chief Marketers Los Angeles, a networking group for high-level marketing executives, and f...

MEET JENNIE LEGARY Artistpreneur: design, branding, & marketing consultant with a diverse background in classical music, real estate, finance, media, and startup business development. Opera singer, co-founder, and cryptocurrency/tech enthusiast. Currently, as Chief Marketing Officer of imusify, she is assisting the startup venture in running their upcoming ICO campaign. Experienced in the role...

Joe Ferraro is currently in his 19th year as an educator, teaching English 12, Public Speaking, and Creative Writing. In addition to his work in the classroom, he is the creator and host of the personal growth podcast One Percent Better. His mission is to help people leverage small changes in mindset, language, and behavior in order to get life-changing results. On his quest to learn the secrets o...

MEET ALEX HASLAM: Alex Haslam is a television enthusiast and streaming expert at HowtoWatch.com, a site dedicated to helping fellow TV watchers find streaming solutions and cable alternatives. She is also a writer, both freelance and in support of her work with HowtoWatch.com. She specializes in topics like consumer technology, television, and cord cutting. You can find her writing on many publica...

Mary Shores spends her career as an author, speaker, and entrepreneur, generating positive and pragmatic solutions for people who are freaking out. Mary blends personal experience with her extensive knowledge of neuroscience and human behavior to guide businesses and individuals to defeat the freakout and create their ideal life. Mary Shores BOOK: Conscious Communications: Your Step-by-Step Guide...

David Burkus is a best-selling author, a sought after speaker, and business school professor. In 2017, he was named as one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50 David Burkus His newest book, Friend of a Friend, offers readers a new perspective on how to grow their networks and build key connections—one based on the science of human behavior, not rote networking advice. He is al...

MEET SHANNON KENDALL Shannon spent 7 years as an actor in New York City before waking up one morning in April 2017 and deciding to do something completely different with her life. In less than a year, she taught herself to write code, attended a top dev Bootcamp in NYC, and started working as an Application Developer at Lifion by ADP. She also just recently finished reading the Harry Potter series...

Alyse McConnell Alyse McConnell guides business leaders to become stronger communicators, better collaborators, and more inspiring leaders. Her passion is to help people find ways to overcome the roadblocks that limit their top performance and daily joy. She believes that businesses, not governments, will champion the big important efforts to improve quality of life for all people. Alyse started h...

Kay Sanders, known as the Creator of Possibilities is an Intuitive Business Coach, Certified Akashic Record Consultant, and Bestselling Author. Kay helps conscious entrepreneurs find that missing piece to create momentum in their Business and re-ignite their Manifesting Mojo so they can make a difference in the world, create more freedom in their life and tap into the magic and power of manifestin...

Margo Aaron began her career in academia as a psychological researcher for a prestigious mental health clinic where she discovered how difficult it is to get people to take action. Determined to get to the bottom of this problem, she went to graduate school at Columbia University. After earning her Masters in Psychology, she accidentally ended up in marketing. Aaron worked as a market researcher a...