Artistic and creative careers are among the most rewarding, but they also come with unique challenges. We asked some of the city’s best creatives to tell us why they choose to pursue a creative career.

Teresa E. Craven

I embarked on an artistic and creative career because creating has always provided me with a sense of peace. Since childhood, I have been drawing and designing. As a shy kid, I often kept to myself, but art became my outlet for expressing feelings I found difficult to vocalize. Sharing my art and seeing its impact on others brought me immense joy. Although I never envisioned becoming a hairstylist—my initial dream was to be a fashion designer in New York City, working on the runway— Read More>>

Yingzhi He

I’ve always been curious about the world around me — especially how people interact with spaces, cities, and the environment. I first explored those feelings through painting and photography. Later, when I got into architecture and urban design, I realized that design isn’t just about making things look good — it’s really like the medium between people and the world around them. To me, architecture, and other spatial design broadly, have the potential to guide, reflect, and even challenge the values of the context they exist in. Read More>>

Camille Cannon

I’m a first-generation college graduate, and the general career advice I heard from my parents was “get good grades so you can get a full-time job after you graduate.” Growing up, my dad worked in construction, and my mom worked evenings (in retail, a call center, a panadería) so that she could be home with my two siblings and me during the day. My parents showed me what it meant to work hard. Read More>>

Sungchul Lee

In 2015, I first joined the press as a photojournalist, and since then, I have faced countless painful scenes through the viewfinder. People were sobbing and crying, and I was trained and instructed to observe the situation without running away. As time passed, I became more and more insensitive to people’s pain, and at some point, I found myself pressing the shutter without any emotion. I had become a machine that produced news photographs, endlessly repeating the same actions without knowing when it all began. Read More>>