Career Conversations

June 17, 2024

Evolve ACD Jia Lu Ni hosts a panel event for Pride Month.

This past month, we partnered with Oregon MESA and Portland Frontrunners to host a Career Conversations event to celebrate Pride Month and elevate voices from the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Hosted by Jia Lu Ni, Associate Creative Director at Evolve, this event featured a panel of three creative folks in design, film, journalism, and science disciplines, who came together to share a bit about their career journey. Here’s what they had to share:

“When life gives you moldy lemons, you bedazzle the sh!t out of that lemon! To me, creativity will always be the closest thing to magic we have in this world. It helped me survive my journey as a trans woman to express my lived experience through my work, and it gave me a sense of stability I yearned for as a child.”

Kennedy Barrera-Cruz (She/Her)

“I associate my queerness not only with my gender and my sexuality but also with the way I live my life each day. Queerness is the alternative to the norms of society. It’s imagining new things and a new way of living. It was time to stop trying to convince all of these people that I belong here, and to put my effort into creating spaces for people who don’t feel like they belong.”

Adri Corrales (They/Them)

“There’s so much negative stereotyping and storytelling of all these identities I possess. For me, working on this film, Mai American has been a way to process a lot of this. Deep down, I’m trying to unlearn this self-hate and also prevent this for other people. When I was younger, that story was something I was so ashamed of, but now these are things that I have gotten a lot of strength from.”

Kevin Truong

We can’t wait for the next one!