A portrait of the artist as a young woman | photo textile artist

[introduction]

Kayla Dantz
Sometimes talking about business things and more commercial aspects of it feels like the antithesis of something that's so creative and something that I really love, but I wouldn't be able to do it if it wasn't for that side. And it's really hard and important to not lose sight of either the creativity and the passion and the reason you're doing it, and also the way in which you can do it, which is to make money from it and to have a business that's supporting the work.

Dave Weich
Hi, I’m Dave Weich, and you’re listening to Work-Shaped Life.

Using a camera and a loom, artist Kayla Dantz explores how time distorts, preserves, and ultimately reshapes our memories.

In 2025, Kayla was featured on the London-based website It’s Nice That, a global platform for the creative community that reaches millions of people each month. “We haven’t ever seen images like Kayla Dantz’s before,” the profile began. “The Massachusetts-based artist is carving a visual language entirely of her own.”

Kayla is 24, just two years out of college. Her woven photographs and prints have sold in nearly twenty countries around the world. Since graduating from Parsons School of Design in 2024, she’s been living with her parents in the Boston suburb where she grew up.

When I ask her mom, Bev, what she recalls of Kayla’s earliest creative efforts, she tells me, “When Kayla’s appendix burst at the end of third grade, some women came to sew pillowcases for the children in the hospital. Kayla ended up helping them do the sewing.”

I’ve heard this story before—because Kayla’s mom is my sister. Kayla, Bev’s daughter, is my niece. I’m Uncle Dave. And whenever I’m back east to visit, I catch up on her latest projects, so I was thrilled for the excuse this podcast provides to pester Kayla with more questions.


[interview]

Dave Weich
How would you describe your work? What do you do?

Kayla Dantz
I like to call myself a photo textile artist. So a large part of my process is photography and it is digital or film photography. And then a large part of it is I'm weaving fabric. So yeah, I'm a physical artist working a lot with my hands, and also working a lot on social media. And I'm also a store owner, I guess you could say. So I sell the art, whether that's to clients—I do commission work. I also make original work, and I sell that on my own website. Sometimes I sell that to galleries.

Dave Weich
Describe for people who've never seen them what a woven photo is when you make it.

Kayla Dantz
Essentially it is a photograph that has been printed or depicted onto fabric. The fabric is cut up by hand into these fragments, into strips, pieces that are then woven back together.

So if you know anything about weaving, there's a warp and a weft. And the photo fabric acts as the weft. So it's being threaded through the warp—yarn. And the result is, it’s a flat textile piece that can be displayed typically in a frame, like fine art.

Dave Weich
Okay, so aside from the tactile nature of it, why weaving? What was it about weaving that really made you want to go in that direction?

Kayla Dantz
I was in school for fashion design and I was working a lot with different materiality forms, so knitting, weaving, beading, embroidery. I liked working with my hands. I liked sort of more intricate fabric in that way, and creating the fabric myself. I actually always thought I would go into knitting, which is similar and yet also the complete opposite. If you know about most fabrics are either woven or they're knit. So it's just like they're kind of opposites when it comes to fabric, but they're really similar in terms of like if you like one, you'll probably like the other. I always was really interested in knitting and actually I had a class where we were really meant to experiment with different types of materiality and specifically lean into things that maybe we weren't we didn't already know that we liked.

And I had also taken a pretty quick little class for New York City Textile Month, one of the years I was there. It was completely free. I think it was actually these grad students from Parsons were putting it on in a park in Brooklyn and they gave us all little peg looms and we were just weaving with the materials they brought. And that was my first ever time weaving. And I was like, this is really fun, and it's very similar to the things I already enjoy. And then before I knew it, I bought a really small loom. That wasn't a peg loom, it was like more of an actual loom. And from there I just really felt in tune with it. I still like to knit and that type of thing, but weaving just, I don't know, it just felt different. It felt like it came a little bit more naturally to me.

Dave Weich
So you take photos, you print them on fabric, you deconstruct the fabric, you weave them back together. But generally speaking, the photo is recognizable, you can see the photo even after this process. What even led you to the idea of you know what would be cool? If I took these photos apart and put them back together… What were you envisioning when you did that?

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, it wasn't a very linear process.  I had done a few different fashion projects with weaving but I had never incorporated the photography, combining the weaving.

I had also always loved photography. I did dark room classes but even before college. And while I was in college, we had gone through a lot of family photos at the time. Those were just really intriguing to me. From a fashion perspective, at first I was really interested in sort of depicting the clothes within those photos.

Dave Weich
Many of which we were talking about nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties.

Kayla Dantz
Yes, yes. These were mostly I think from sixties through eighties mainly. There was a photo…it was a family photo featuring you and my mom and my grandparents, your parents. And almost all of you, maybe minus one, was wearing plaid. It was just very prevalent. And so I had done actually a whole paper on sort of the meaning behind plaid, why it was so prevalent during that time period, mainly the seventies.

And because plaid and weaving have a lot to do with each other…a lot of plaid fabrics are woven and also this intersection of colors and lines are pretty similar if not the same in a lot of cases.

So I was kinda thinking to myself, okay, how could I combine this element of maybe recontextualizing the fashion I'm seeing in these old family photos and also weaving, maybe weaving my own plaid. So I actually experimented with a lot of different types of photo weaving. Some of them I did make my own like plaids, and I was doing…people who know knitting might know the term intarsia, but it's sort of like knitting shapes within a knit fabric. I was kind of doing that with weaving. I was weaving in Tartar. So I was weaving the silhouettes of these figures in the photos, more in a color blocking way, and I was combining that with the plaids. I was also doing a version where I was painting the photos onto a pre-woven fabric. And then sort of my more realistic process was actually to figure out ways of printing the photos onto fabric and then actually just weaving that. And that's kind of where I'm at now in terms of processes for this.

Dave Weich
Right. Number one, that seems like you arrived at a more practical process and output. For you, in what you're trying to express when you're taking a photo and you're doing this to it, what do you think the relationship is between the photo and what you make out of it?

Kayla Dantz
Yeah. It definitely started as a representation of viewing moments that I wasn't there for, I wasn't alive for, but are still a part of me, because it's my family, it's my culture, you could say. And I have a more distorted view. I wasn't there. So it's a very detached, fragmented format of these moments.

And I think that's true even with photos that aren't from before my time, because photos are a form of memory, and memories aren't necessarily everlasting in the sense that they're not always clear. They're usually not clear. They're usually distorted with time and sort of worn with time. So a woven photo is in essence representative of memory and how memory changes.

Dave Weich
How long have you been doing that? When did you do your first woven photo?

Kayla Dantz
So technically it was during my senior year of school, which was a little less than three years ago now. I've been doing just the woven photos outside of fashion for about two years now.

Dave Weich
When did you recognize, This is something I want to do more of and maybe there's something to it?

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, it was definitely a combination of things. I think, like I said, I studied fashion, which I still love and I think I still have a fashion mindset when it comes to a lot of the things I create. but fashion it was really time consuming, especially because I was so interested in making the textiles and then turning those into physical wearable garments, was a whole other challenge and something that as much as I did love that and I still love that, I recognized that I was so passionate about the textiles themselves that I sort of wanted to focus on them. And I think I was just asking myself, is this possible to make into a more fine art business than a clothing business? Because that was just my interest. I was really lucky to get a lot of feedback from all of those different processes and outcomes of the woven photographs and I felt like most people really were leaning into this particular design or method. And I also really enjoyed working with this method and so I kinda just started to ask myself, okay, how could I take this into this other direction?

Like I said, I already had a love for photography and actually kind of a whole catalog of my own photos that I was excited to pull from and start creating from and combining these different textiles with these photos. So I guess I started there. I still kept pulling from archived family photos that I really loved. 

And I just started posting them on social media, pretty much. Yeah, and I kinda just found my groove and people really resonated with them.

There's one particular… I kept working with a lot of family photos, and it's funny. One of them… I did a few pieces for Christmas, though they don't necessarily have to be for Christmas. There was a couple that actually had Christmas trees, but a couple were just like scenes of family around a dinner table.

One of them particularly was at my grandma's house, which I still go to every year. They still live there. I did this piece of my family around the table. And I ended up giving a print to my grandma. And she was just sitting there and she was like, “I don't understand why anyone would want to buy this.” And she wasn't being mean or rude or saying that my work was bad, but she didn't understand why anyone else would want to own a picture of someone else's family. Whether it's in this context or not.

Dave Weich
Yeah.

Kayla Dantz
And I think that kind of goes to show that like this new format of weaving the photo, it really is connecting the personal to the more universal. Because in the woven format, you can't really make out faces, some of the details are lost, they're fuzzy, but I think a lot of people can relate to a family dinner scene.

And yeah, so I think that's just an example of how it's kind of worked and how it's kinda shifted into something that I am able to sell and connect with other people on.

Dave Weich
That's where it came from. And now you go to your website, you've got prints for sale, you have exhibitions that people can link to and buy from those sources or see them in person or whatever it is. So where are you now? How would you describe the current state of this? I mean, can I call it a business?

Kayla Dantz
Yeah. Yeah, sure. It feels a little sometimes like talking about business things and more commercial aspects of it feels like the antithesis of something that's so creative and something that I really love, but I wouldn't be able to do it if it wasn't for that side and visa versa. So they're definitely interconnected, and it is definitely a business.

But yeah, I guess what it looks like now… I do sell work on my website, prints and original pieces. I didn't think prints would be something that was really possible for my medium, but I just started scanning the pieces and creating the prints. It takes a lot of careful putting things together and editing and making sure it looks like the real piece, but once I got the hang of that, I realized that there was a market for the prints.

So I started selling those as well and then started doing more in person shows at museums, galleries, which was really exciting because it is such a physical art form that as much as I can show them online and and take the best photos of them, I don't think you really get the same perspective unless you see them in person.

So that was really exciting. And I would say now I do a lot of commission work because an interesting aspect of this art form is that, you know, I'm not limited to my own photography. If someone else has a photo that they really love and they want that displayed in this format, I can take their photo and create a piece for them that is really personal to them because it's their photo. It's their memory in this format. So I do a lot of commission work. And I also work more so in collections now. The size of the collections varies, but usually between four and maybe fifteen pieces I'll do at once or in a cohesive manner. Maybe they share a concept or something visually, again for a cohesive appearance. And either I'll sell those through my website or I'm starting to now sell those through online marketplaces or galleries.

And then I also do have a print subscription, which is really fun. I started it as a way to A, make the work a little bit more accessible and B, to sort of have an outlet to also write about the work consistently because I do send a small letter with the mini-print. They’re these like five-by-seven or six-by-six prints of the work. And I send those in the mail.

Dave Weich
And it's one a month.

Kayla Dantz
Yes, one a month.

And I send that with a little letter sort of discussing the work. Or maybe it's less even about the specific piece, but maybe about the collection that it was from or the where the photo was taken or how it was weaving it, or it could be about a range of things. But it feels more intimate than social media because it is a more selective group of people that are receiving this and it is a physical piece of paper that people are opening. So I really enjoy that element of the business right now, too.

Dave Weich
And you have subscribers all over the world. I mean, you were profiled—specifically, the mail program, was profiled—in Elle Australia, right?

Kayla Dantz
Yes, that's true. That is true. Which is awesome. It's really cool.

Dave Weich
You talked a little bit about this idea that you're doing something which is physical. Even the cards, they are physical cards that go in the mail. But your marketplace is mostly digital. How much are you communicating with people? Do you get emails and DMs? And how much work is it for you on social platforms and keeping that fresh and going? You're wearing a lot of hats? What does that one look like?

Kayla Dantz
Yes. The more digital, social media hat?

Dave Weich
Yeah. Yeah.

Kayla Dantz
It's a big hat. It's actually something I'm eager to get better at. I think I'm really lucky. I had an iPhone by the time I was in high school, and I really like creating videos. I've always liked that since I was a kid. I like editing videos and taking photos of my work or of things that then become my work. And I'm accustomed to social media, which I'm really grateful for. However, I am not always comfortable talking on social media or even having my face on social media. I'm just a more private person. And so it is sometimes uncomfortable to have a social media presence, but it's also really important for a business in this day and age. And so it's something I try to focus on a lot.

But at the same time I do take breaks from it sometimes if I'm really in a groove in terms of working on something physically or working on a collection or I just have a deadline that's important. I often you know, I will take some short breaks off from social media because it can get really overstimulating. And especially when I was starting, I based a lot of my worth and value on the views I got or the likes I got or the comments I was getting, which isn't really healthy because it's just not always a reflection of what you're doing. And so I have to balance that. But it's like I said, it's incredibly important—I communicate almost entirely with clients and other artists online and I meet them online—and, I think, an amazing tool.

One of the first opportunities I got to show my work in person was actually from Instagram. I randomly was just testing things out. I had almost no followers on Instagram. When I say almost no none, like around a hundred followers on Instagram. So very few. Most of them were my personal contacts. And I randomly put out like an Instagram ad, which I didn't even know how that would go, if that would go. And it just so happens, a group of students, they were putting on this show in DC the following year. And it kind of had to do with my work. My work overlapped with their concept. And so they reached out to me and they were like, “We found your Instagram through your ad and actually we want to see if you'd be a part of the show.” And that was my first time showing in person. So, you just never know who you're gonna find online.

Dave Weich
I mean it's worth noting, you've been interested and actively sort of working in this kind of stuff since you were not even ten years old. I mean, you've literally been sewing since you were what, six, seven years old?

Kayla Dantz
I think so.

Dave Weich
Yeah, I mean right. You can barely remember.

And so you knew enough about your interests to follow them to college. What did you do? Whether in a work environment, internship or whatever job may have been, or in school, what did you take with you out of that experience that you actually find is still present in your work?

Kayla Dantz
I mean, I took a lot of things from college. Like you said, I've always had I always kinda knew where my interests were and my passions were. But I had a…  still had a lot of different passions. So I loved to sew, I loved fashion, I loved photography, I loved drawing, I loved all different aspects of art and design.

I love digital and video-making too. I was considering going to school for film or photo. So going into school, I was just really excited to learn and to actually get the technical skills that maybe I was lacking previously. Because I didn't go to an art high school, though my high school had really great resources. So I was really excited to get technical skills and that's definitely what I got.

But it was also just crazy going to school with like-minded people and professors who were working in the art world who, you know, they often told us, you know, it's not an easy world to work in or to start in. But, you know, they had their own stories. Obviously, they were still in the world, and to them it was worth it. And they had a lot of great feedback for us.

And to, like I said, to make friends and to be surrounded by those like-minded people where this was also their passion, was really, really cool. We can just relate heavily on yeah, building sort of a life and a work environment based on your passions, which is really hard to do. But it's really satisfying if, you know, if and when things work out.

I did a lot of work and internships outside of school too, which was great because it did teach me, you know, a good work ethic, A, and B, I think especially just relationships with clients, because that's really big in the art world, you know, how you communicate with clients, how you maintain those relationships and just like process in terms of creating a product, selling products.

I mostly was studying fashion. So I had a lot of jobs where I was, you know, working with wholesalers, or I worked in the jewelry industry for a little bit, and in person, you know, in the Diamond District in New York City. People are working with their hands and yeah, it was a really cool experience. So learned a lot in a few different avenues, I would say.

Dave Weich
You live in a suburb of Boston. You live right now with my sister—

Kayla Dantz
Yes.

Dave Weich
—which I think is awesome, too, because I think it's so practical, but also just win-win for everybody.

You know, you grew up there, and you went to New York City for four years. You must have been excited to go. You must have also been kind of freaked out in a way, right? I mean, like all of a sudden you're in a completely different world without your family. So I'm just curious what that all felt like.

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, I would say, I mean, the best word, it's positive and negative, but New York is very overstimulating. I think that was the biggest shock for people who know me, which is that I don't think anyone in my life was surprised that I went to art school. That was like the least shocking thing to have ever occurred. I think the more shocking thing was that I would move to such a crazy big city because I am more of a homebody and I like peace and quiet. I think it's kinda funny because my work, a lot of people have said it's very—not that it's quiet, but it is more peaceful than it is loud, maybe.

Dave Weich
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kayla Dantz
So, I did a summer program in New York City before I went to school there full time. Kind of testing the waters to see if I would like it, to see if I was good enough to be there. I still, you know, that remains to be seen maybe. But I did a summer program there for about a month and I really just fell in love with the people and the creativity mainly. I was not used to walking down the street and seeing people wearing the things that they were wearing and doing the things that they were doing.

I kinda knew that if I was gonna study art, I was gonna study art. I might as well go to New York City and have those resources and really just try to take it all in. But it was really overstimulating. I think it's also really—it's an expensive city to live in. So it definitely had its drawbacks. But the main thing was that I was never like, where am I gonna see a museum? Where am I gonna buy this? That was never a question of resources, visual resources especially. And there are plenty of more economically friendly resources in New York City. Public events. I mean, even, New York City has a Textile Month. September is New York City Textile Month. I had never heard of such a thing before.

Yeah, it was really cool. And I don't even think I took full advantage of living there when I did, just because, like I said, things were expensive and I was really busy doing school. I actually probably spent more time in my apartment than people might think because I was physically working in my apartment and in the classroom so often. But I have enjoyed sort of taking everything I learned from that and bringing it back to a place that feels more like me, where I can breathe a little bit more. And I still visit all the time because I still love it.

Dave Weich
Yeah. Like you said and your professors told you and was probably obvious to you all along, it is not an easy field to make a living and to find any sort of stability. On the other hand, I think even aside from that, what you're doing, which may be even more notable or I don't know, it's interesting to me. You're basically building a living, at least for this period of your life, from scratch. You're figuring things out as you go along. You're not just getting a job with someone or working at a fill-in-the-blank, you know, an art gallery or…

There's the art, and it has to have a business component if it's going to actually be a sustainable practice. I don't think that a lot of artists are not willing to confront and or deal with.

Kayla Dantz
Mm-hmm.

Dave Weich
I just think the practicality that you're attaching to your creativity is really, really interesting and admirable, and probably completely essential.

Kayla Dantz
Yes. Unfortunately it's essential. I mean, I enjoy aspects of the business. I think, you know, strategizing about certain things and paying attention to the market can be really fun if you choose to look at it that way. But it's important, yeah, it's really hard and important to not lose sight of either the creativity and the passion and the reason you're doing it.

And also the way in which you can do it, which is to make money from it and to have a business, that's supporting the work.

Dave Weich
Right. And part of the reason that you're able to support it is because you live at home.

Kayla Dantz
Yes.

Dave Weich
My understanding of the deal is that you are tasked with making dinner a certain number of times a week.

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, almost almost every night. I but yeah, I'd say that's one of my main roles at home. but yes, I'm really grateful to still live with my parents out of school. It's not something I anticipate happening for so many years, but while I'm here I'm super grateful. And like you said, I hope it's pretty mutually beneficial because I try and provide, you know, as a member of the household. And it's certainly economical for my business because it does require physical space. And it takes up more space than people might expect.

Dave Weich
Yeah. Well, I mean, let's be clear here. I think Bev is probably thanking the stars daily that she gets to spend this time with you. And I'm sure that at some point later in your life you will be incredibly grateful for it as well.

How does that situate you among your friends? I mean, you grew up, what, five miles from where I grew up? People grow up to do all sorts of things. And so now you're back. Are you still in touch with a lot of the people that you grew up with? And if so, do you ever talk about work with them? What do they talk about? What are they doing?

Kayla Dantz
Being twenty-four is a bit of an in-between age. So many of my friends are working, but if they're working, it's probably their first full-time job. Plenty of my friends are applying to grad school, some of them are finishing grad school, some of them are in school, some of them are in between jobs, some of them like me have maybe started their own job or self-employed. So it's definitely a mixed bag.

But I have a couple of friends here from like-minded interests growing up, they also are into creative things. So I have friends that I grew up with here that I feel the same way about.

I do have a friend from Parsons who has her own business and that's what she's doing full time as well. She has a knitwear brand. She's amazing. Her brand is Parker Zinn.
We graduated Parsons together and our professors together kind of gave us feedback that like, look, you can start your own thing right out of school, but it's not necessarily the smartest thing to do. Like, you might want to get more experience. You might just wanna have a little bit of something to fall back on. But her and I were really gung-ho about different, you know, avenues, but similar things. We were both into textiles and a handmade element of craft and whatnot.

When we were first starting, I would FaceTime her probably maybe twice a week. We would have these, we would call them meetings, because we had no one else to really…we didn't have employees, we didn't have employers. So we would do that with each other and we still catch up a lot. So that's really great to have when you are doing something like this because it's really it is hard to relate to other people who do have more steady jobs and when I say steady, I mean, you know, an employer and maybe an actual place you're going to for work and fellow coworkers and paid time off, things like that, are really different.

And talking to my friends now, yeah, like I said, it's a mixed bag. We're all kind of in different, like varying places in career, but it's really interesting because, you know, I'll get a call from a friend who does have a more normal job and they don't really know why I'm working at seven p.m. or, you know, if I'm answering emails when I'm on vacation, they don't that's something that's a little bit just unknown to them as well. But at the same time, I will take two weeks to go somewhere to do photos, and they're like, “How can you take two weeks off?” And I'm like, well it's not really like not really taking two weeks off.

Dave Weich
It's not really off. 

Kayla Dantz
And also I do have freedom, like a lot of freedom in my job.

Dave Weich
Now that you're out of school, how do you keep learning? How do you sort of stay engaged in the sense of learning and seeing and all the new things that maybe you don't get now that you're not in New York City anymore?

Kayla Dantz
So actually right now I am…I love learning languages. I'm learning French, which is really fun. I've learned it for a while, like or I've been learning it for a while. I started when I was in high school, but for a while now I've been like, okay, what's the point of partially knowing this when I could fully know it? So I actually take French classes almost every morning. I get up and I have online classes at like 8 a.m and then I'll start my workday after that. And I love that because I get to interact with people. It's group classes. I get to talk with people, but I feel like my brain is really turned on and it's something that is not really related to my work. But it could be related to my work. You know, traveling is something I really love and hopefully can intersect with my work more as I get older. So that's one thing I've really been loving.

Dave Weich
What are you excited about or what do you think about when you allow yourself to daydream and imagine what you might do, I don't even know, next, just sometime. What do you think about?

Kayla Dantz
I mean from a business more practical side, obviously earning more of a living is great and it's definitely a goal because I do consider myself successful, which I'm really grateful for, but at the same time I work a lot. And so I would love for it to feel less, a little less chaotic. Right now it's pretty chaotic. And so if my work sells for a bit more and gives me a slightly more comfortable life, that's amazing.

But sort of as I mentioned, I would love if traveling intersected more with my work. I'm at an interesting point where I'm selling internationally, especially my print subscription, which is easier to sell internationally. If I were able to turn the business into or just turn like what I do and be able to do what I do more internationally, that would be amazing. One of my dreams is to have maybe a place in a separate country where I can work there and when I need a new environment, I can come back. And I don't see myself ever really like fully leaving here, Massachusetts, because I do really love it. But I do think I feel very creatively refreshed with a change of scenery and a change of pace and a change of culture. I think that would let me learn a lot, too,  and also reach more people. So that's definitely a goal, is to expand myself in that sense. And yeah, I also, I mean shorter term, just like taking on new types of projects would be really fun. I'm only starting now to do more commercial-type projects. And that's really fun just because, yeah, it's just a different creative avenue to go down. That excites me.

Dave Weich
Describe more commercial projects. What might that entail?

Kayla Dantz
Right now I'm doing a few pieces for a restaurant space. which is sort of a commercial project because it's more of a commercial space. You know, I've talked to music artists about collaborating in that sense and maybe doing album cover work. Yeah, just crossing paths with more artists and doing what I do in different formats, I think, is exciting.

Dave Weich
Do you think your friends are more confused by what you do or envious? Or neither.

Kayla Dantz
Maybe a mix of all of them. I know people really close to me are definitely envious of certain freedoms that I have. But at the same time, people who are really close to me know that there are trade-offs. So yeah, there are trade offs with everything. So, you know, there are definitely downsides and I accept those because I love what I do. And I think some people think I'm crazy, especially when I was first starting to post things online, and I was saying to just a few people that this was kind of my plan of what I was gonna do for a living. They were like, “That doesn't really seem like a good idea, or something that's stable or smart.”

I think plenty of my friends are definitely confused. I could explain it to some of my friends like twenty times what I do and they still don't really understand, which is totally fair because I went to years of school in this department. I don't understand what some of my friends do. Some of my friends are in, you know, tech and certain things that are a foreign language to me. Which I'm sure this is to them, too.

Dave Weich
Right. Well, I mean that is sort of like the underlying idea behind this whole series of interviews. The reality is most people's jobs are a complete mystery to virtually everyone else. If you've been doing it for a while, you have such a deep understanding of it, and that understanding is yours. It is so particular to your experience of the world and work. It's not as if when you get off work, you go talk to your friends and you tell them every single detail about your workday. No one wants to do that. Our jobs do tend to be really kind of siloed in that way. And there's this way in which you're deeply, deeply expert in something that virtually no one asks you about in a meaningful way because they wouldn't even know where to start.

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like I said, it's really entertaining to me when someone, like if I'm at a bar with friends and like someone I don't know as well asks me about what I do, I'm like, I kind of have to like I'm like, Okay, I could just show you a picture. That would be picture pictures with a thousand words, right? I think that might be more… it might be a better explanation. But yeah, it's certainly really hard to explain. and I don't have the perspective of someone who doesn't know what I do. So it's hard to put myself in their shoes.

Dave Weich
Tell me more about social media. I know that it's a particular part of what you do, which has its upsides and its downsides, because you meet tons of people in a very digital, peculiar way, but you also essentially can have a career doing this.

Kayla Dantz
Yes, it's something like I said, I want to prioritize more because I recognize the significance of it because I've met so many people through it. In fact, one of the first times I started really selling product consistently was through someone who just shouted me out on…I believe it was TikTok. And we still follow each other to this day. I'm really grateful to her because it just so happened that she made a video and mentioned me and her followers resonated with my work and it just takes one person, one video, to actually really change your life in a way because that really changed the projection of what I was doing and maybe focusing on.

And then I think in, maybe the following year, but within a matter of months, I had a video that I made that did really well. That one in particular has given me a lot of work commission-wise and so I'm grateful for each of those things. But you also never know. I didn't necessarily post that video thinking it would do better than another video, but it just does. And so things are by chance. And also, it's a great tool for storytelling, for marketing, and for meeting people. But of course, it's not always my main focus because I want the work to look good before the video of the work looks good. Yeah.

Dave Weich
Right, which is good.

That's probably the proper focus. And at the end of the day, you know, it's tricky because it's really on the one hand you're saying like it's very important and in some ways has given you the opportunities you have. And at the same time, like most of life, it's really just the relationships, even if they're just digital.

Kayla Dantz
Right. And sometimes or not sometimes—oftentimes it's quality over quantity. So the quality of the people viewing your work and actually how they're gonna participate with your work matters more than the amount of people participating in your work sometimes. But you know, the way algorithms work, if a video is doing really good and it's getting a lot of viewership, maybe then it'll reach that one person who will, you know, make that difference and that impact. So it's hard. No one I don't think anyone knows for sure.

I think the trick really, honestly, I think the biggest trick is to just keep doing it because you naturally get better at social media by practicing it. I think that's true for almost everyone who does it.

Dave Weich
One of the real inhibitions that people have about social, and I'm talking about just about anybody in any sort of use of social, is criticism. You know, just getting for sometimes for nothing at all. What is your experience like in social, just in terms of the vibe of the people who are interacting with you?

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, I am lucky. I really don't face a lot of criticism. If I do, it's usually not super harsh, which is really nice. If I do get criticism, it's about the work, which is an extension of myself, but it's usually never personal. And yeah, I take everything with a grain of salt. If I do get criticism that suggests what I do is less than what I think it is. You know, I know that they don't know me and they probably don't really know the work that well either. So yeah.

Dave Weich
That's a good attitude. Yeah.

Well thank you, Kayla.

Kayla Dantz
Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.


[outro]

Bailey Cain
With only four episodes left in Season One of Work-Shaped Life, we’ve started to book guests for Season Two. We want to hear from you! If you know someone with a fascinating work-shaped life who you feel would be a good fit for the podcast, reach out to us at workshapedlife.com.

Work-Shaped Life is produced by Sheepscot Creative. It’s hosted by Dave Weich, edited by Michael Nipper and me, Bailey Cain, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff.

We’ll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.