The Creative Mentor Podcast

In the fall of 2019 I took on the Mentorship position with the Chicago AIGA to mentor 10 creatives through navigating a corporate career. No one tells you how to bring your talent to work, only that you’re talented. I had such a great experience in teaching that semester that it carried over to this project. The Creative Mentor Podcast is a passion project I created in the 2020 Pandemic. I was sitting around my house on TikTok, like everyone else, and saw a lot of art students asking for advice on how to build a business or career. They were all as frustrated as I was when I was in their position. Not being able to connect with other people, or go to events, or in a position to teach, I created a podcast to tell everyone anything they wanted to know. I covered base salary rates, how to gain contracts through creative agencies, how to talk about your work, what to have in your portfolio, and so much more. I created this to be a resource for green creatives and to have something to fill my time with. Before I knew it I gained 5,600+ TikTok followers, 100,000+views on YouTube and TikTok combined, and over 2,000 monthly listeners to my podcast across Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Podbean.
Below are my most popular Tiktoks, note if you have an ad blocker on you will not be able to view the embedded video.

As Available As Possible

I tried to make this podcast a resources that was as free, and available to people as possible. My philosophy is that there is enough elitism and gate keeping in the creative industry. It’s time everyone have an equal playing field and have access to understand what they’re getting themselves into by choosing to be creative as their job. I put clips on TikTok, and I uploaded episodes to my YouTube channel, ad free. I host this podcast through Podbean so that it can stream on as many podcast platforms as possible, again, ad free.

Colleague Interviews

My audience expressed to me that they wanted to hear other creatives perspectives. As this project grew what I learned about myself is that I am a great mouthpiece to translate creativity to work, business, what have you. I’ve never once done anything in this podcast alone. I always had other creatives inspire me through conversations we would have. So it seemed like a no brainer to reach out and get them on the mic to ask them questions about the great insight I knew they had to offer.
click the images below to watch my most popular episodes as well as the limited interview series.

I also created a Patreon page for listeners who were interested in premium content, such as early release episodes, as well as my monthly work book that would summarize all the content I would cover in the podcast for that month.

First Digital Download Work Book

Every month I built one of these work books based off the episodes I published. This interactive PDF was available to my Patrons on Patreon, and would have valuable tidbits, links, questions, and other resources pertinent to the subject of the month.

I am still working on this podcast all the time. In my mind it is a 12 month long project with an end date of January 2022. It’s a lot of work to manage all the design, production, and writing on my own. But it’s a huge labor of love and I’ve learned and grown a lot through this project. I hope I can publish my work books into one big workbook some day and maybe speak at schools when it’s safe to travel more freely. I am open to see where it continues to take me.

 All graphics, videos, and recordings were produced and executed by myself. No freelancer help was used on this project.