OBRA: The Art of Work

Sari Cohen

TV host/journalist

hollywoodfirstlookfeatures.com | inlovemag.com

When I first started and I was looking for writing jobs and I first locked onto this editorial gig, they were looking for a lifestyle writer and political writer and I wanted to write about politics. I wanted to follow Bernie Sanders around. I pitched them six different articles, three about lifestyle and three about politics and that’s when they wrote back to me and they were like, “We want to give you a column and we want it to be about L.A. fashion trends.” The weird thing was I didn’t know about fashion trends, I didn’t know about brands, but I went with the idea of what inspires somebody to wear what they’re wearing and who they are underneath and what that represents. And that’s how AXS found me, because I started interviewing more people.

So things have gotten crazier! Basically what happened was things magnified a million times over since that last interview when it was like the Wild West out there… I real...

Genevieve Anders

Genevieve Elaine Photography | https://genevieveelaine.com/

I used to take a ton of pictures of my dogs. This was before I had kids. I had a Canon PowerShot and I’d go get all the Halloween costumes and I would dress them up and take pictures of them. My boyfriend at the time bought me my first camera, and I didn’t even know how to turn it on. It was so intimidating that I was like, “I just want to use my PowerShot… I don’t want that.” But then I learned how to turn it on and that’s what I did: I took pictures of my dogs. I had friends that were on Flickr and they were in a photography group – it was 365 Project. They give you a prompt, like “hot or cold” or it could be literally anything, and you have to be creative and it was every single day. So I did that for the year with my camera and my dogs and I posted everything on Flickr. Getty images contacted me and wanted to use the photos of my dogs. So they did; they used the photos of my dogs and they own the pictures st...

Hannah Quinn

Bartender/server

I was 16 and I wanted a job. I remember I was sitting at Norm’s restaurant and somebody told me I would love working there, like, “You would be really good as a waitress.” I was 16, working at Target, did not like it, and then kind of wiggled my way in to Norm’s that was right down the street. It was a 24-hour one and I was able to start out as a host. I liked being a host, but I wanted to serve. I was determined to make that cash money! I thankfully was only a host for six months and then started serving, so maybe I think I was closer to 18 when I became a server. I fell in love with it. There’s a super addicting weird high that I get when I’m in the weeds and really busy. I love having to do like 13 little things all at once because I think it helps me feel like I’m checking off a list. And I was 18 years old and having money in my pocket every single day, which was really rad.

I think I lasted at Norm’s for a few years. I was ready to move on and my mom fo...

Aileen Del Riego

Director of Operations

I’m the director of operations of a privately owned dental practice. I had a really nontraditional journey to getting to my job. Before I started managing a dental practice I was teaching preschool, which actually is not very much different, as it turns out, than managing a dental practice. And then I was the director on the board of Wagging Dog Rescue, and that’s a volunteer position but it was a lot of dealing with different people and personalities and things that people are really passionate about. You just have to play into what people need, in that position. Same thing with the preschool that I worked at. It was kind of interesting because it’s a parent co-op preschool so I was the only teacher in the room and then I’d be working with three volunteer parents every day. It was the same 15 parents, because I had 15 kids, so it wasn’t like new people every day but it was on a rotating schedule and so managing all of that was a lot. I ran parent...

Regina DeMoville | Owner, Heart Captioning, Inc.

https://heartcaptioning.com/

A lot of people know court reporting as the lady sitting in the court with the little machine. A normal keyboard, the average is like 40, 50, 60 words per minute. On this, our average is 200 words per minute. In school, we start out in the beginning with theory and that’s where they teach you the keyboard. So, you notice that there’s no letters on the keys. The first thing that they teach you is which keys are what. They give you a little card stock picture of the keyboard that has the keys on it.

This is the left bank. This is the right bank. And then down here are the vowels. How it works is it’s phonetic, so the beginning sound of a word would be on the left side and then you have the vowel which would be like the middle part of the word. And then the right part would be the end. On here [regular keyboard], we would type cat, C-A-T. But there is no C on our keyboard. It’s K because it’s phonetic: it would be...

Christine Catipon
Clinical psychologist

I am a licensed psychologist, with a doctorate in clinical psychology. What that means is I provide talk therapy to people who want emotional support. I’m called Dr. Christine or Dr. Catipon or sometimes just Christine, because I don’t like emphasizing any power differential when I’m working with my clients. Some clients like to use “Doctor” in addressing me because of their cultural background or their respect for elders or professionals, so I’m comfortable with however they want to address me.

I’m a second-generation Filipino-American, and from a really early age, there was a lot of pressure to become a doctor. To my immigrant parents and extended family, it was all about coming here to the U.S. to give their kids a “better life.” What that looks like is financial success and being very affluent. So from kindergarten, I was told I was going to be a doctor. A medical doctor — that’s the only kind of doctor that they could acknowledge existed. But...

Maria Morris

Hypnotherapist | Embody Excellence Hypnotherapy

Both my parents are ministers. My dad is much more orthodox; my mother is unorthodox. Both Christian, two totally different perspectives on religion! My mother was the type that studied Eastern medicine, meditation, she took college classes for communication. My mother and dad have a 14-year age gap, so whereas my dad is very educated also, he was educated later. My dad’s the young one. So, she always taught us about the power of our thoughts, about healing, and I used to see her pray for people, lay hands on people… You know, the falling out, the stereotypical stuff of people falling all over the place and “You need a healing?” — that type of stuff. But you know what, I’ve seen people actually get healed in situations like that, as crazy and theatrical as it is — and looks — I realized that it’s all about the person who’s receiving and believing and that it can be any religion, as long as you have a belief system. The mind is...

Gabriela Parson
Ultrasound Technician

When I was 15 my father died. I had money in savings that he had left me for college, but my brothers took it. Because I was a minor on the account, they got my mom to sign off and little by little, all of it was gone. Then she took off and I had to fend for myself. So I was homeless for a time, but not like where I ever had to sleep in the street; I had to sleep in my car once. But mostly people’s couches that would take me in, strangers. I had never gone to college. When I met Chad, I was doing an associate’s degree but I wasn’t really sure what it was that I wanted to study. I wanted something stable. Having been through what I went through, I had suffered so much when I lived out in the streets and I never wanted to suffer again. So money was an important thing for me. But with my kids, it was hard to find time to go to school and I had to keep working in order to take care of the household.

When CJ was born, we decided for me to stay at home. He...

Pherlha Aguilar
Model and actress | Tijuana, Mexico
https://pherlhaa.wixsite.com/pherlhaaguilar

I was in school, I was like 15 years old I think, and my cousin was kind of handsome — he’s on TV right now here in TJ, locally. He got into an agency, he took a course in modelling. When he graduated, I went and the owner of that agency saw me and told me, “You should model, too.” And I was like, “Oh. I just came to see my cousin, but… ok!” So I ended up taking the course, entering the agency. They wanted to send me to Japan when I was like 16 and my mom was like, “Hell no, you need to finish something in school, some career or something.” I kept doing it, more on the side, and I stayed here doing campaigns, catalogues, stuff like that. I finished three careers — I have three bachelor degrees.

The first one is in international business from the university here in Baja. Then I moved to Mexico City for contract modelling. I was supposed to be six months in Mexico City and I ended up staying 10...

Liz McTan | Blogger, musician

https://www.facebook.com/echohillofficialband/

https://redheadedramblingmama.blog/

I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades in terms of artistry. I write for Orange County Moms Blog, so I’m a blogger, and I have my own blog called the Redheaded Rambling Mama. I owned a store for three years and we just closed it six months ago and then I do music as well. When I say it all out loud it sounds like a lot but when I feel it in my life it’s like, “Eh, it’s not that much stuff.” 

I went to FIDM from 2013 to 2015. I went back to school as an adult, at 28. I had been working in e-commerce doing copywriting for a long time and I just felt like I wasn’t moving and I wanted to do something a little more challenging. I wanted to get a degree — I’d never had one, I’d always done part-time school. I also have fibromyalgia, which is a big part of my life and why I do a bunch of weird stuff, instead of a full time job where you have to be there 40 hours a week and it’s a set schedul...