Lisa Sonora Beam doesn’t go for the whole “starving artist” thing.
She’s worked for decades on her rebuttal: She thrives as a mixed-media artist, writer, and founder of Digital Hive EcoLogical Design, a San Francisco–based communications firm that works with green businesses. She earned her MBA in Sustainable Enterprise, whose business theories form the strategic backbone of this book.
Lisa has learned that business savvy in an artist is rare: most creative people shy away from the strategic skills necessary to make a living doing what they love. So after yet another artist friend responded to Lisa’s business insights with, “I never thought about that,” she decided to help make sure they did.
Over the course of 20 years teaching workshops, Lisa has honed her techniques for transforming passion into livelihood. She’s taught at leading learning centers like Esalen Institute and Hollyhock, and has been featured in Entrepreneur and Business Week. She develops courses in Green & Social Marketing and has taught at Dominican University's Green MBA. In the studio, she creates mixed-media paintings, artist books, assemblage structures, and continues to run Digital Hive.
With The Creative Entrepreneur, Lisa has finally put passion to paper to help artistic types develop and harness their business savvy. The Creative Entrepreneur is the culmination of an eclectic life of business and art, strategic planning and creative calling. It’s Lisa preaching what she’s practiced: that it’s possible and practical to make a living doing what you love.
A thriving San Francisco Bay Area transplant from Chicago, Lisa lives and works out of a former warehouse that is in various stages of green renovation, where she fantasizes about the perfect organizer for all her art supplies and of sleeping in a Moroccan tent on her (permit pending) living roof.
