Today we’d like to introduce you to Bria Buteau.
Hi Bria, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in May 2023 with a bachelor’s in Medical Laboratory Sciences. Soon after graduation, I got offered an embryology position at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. Although I wanted to be an embryologist at the time, I did not want to move to New York City and decided to only move for one year to gain experience in my field.
In September 2023, I officially moved to Manhattan and started my role as an embryologist. Although the work was engaging, I began to feel drained very quickly because all I did was work and come home. As the seasons changed and fall became winter, I experienced severe bouts of depression and found daily life tasks to be more and more challenging. In a time and place where I felt I had nothing to lean on, I focused on the one thing that always grounded me – my creativity.
I decided to turn my pain into purpose by relaying all of the knowledge I had acquired in my first year living by myself, in a new city, and with no prior connections. I created my podcast “Growing Pains” to not only describe my life lessons, but to ask other creative professionals how they carved out their own unique paths. Through my podcast, I met wonderful people who reaffirmed my love for community, creativity, and collaboration and shared the ups and downs on their own journeys, validating all the grief I had experienced within my own transition.
After a year of podcasting, I decided to bring the Growing Pains community to life by hosting in person events for creative professionals to connect, collaborate, and commune. I hosted my first event in October 2025 and received such an outpouring of support, I decided to make Growing Pains an official collective. Through planning and hosting events for my collective, I discovered that I had an even greater passion than STEM – community building.
While exploring my creative interests, I also discovered my love for another aspect of creativity – DJing. I had met so many DJs throughout all of my events and loved that they could engage with the crowd and the music in their own unique ways. I took up DJing as a way to destress and challenge another part of my brain. In doing so, I rediscovered the love I had for music and sought to find my own sound.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has not been a smooth road but this path has taught me so many things about myself and the kind of life I envision for myself. I quit my embryologist job with no backup plan and struggled for a year to truly find my footing within the event curation space. I lost a lot of money initially – overworking and underselling myself to others to accommodate people in my life I wanted to be included. I also struggled a lot with self confidence and doubt because I am the first person in my family to pursue a nontraditional path regarding my career. I didn’t believe that I could fully lean on my creative skills and passions to create the life I wanted.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a community curator who creates intentional connection spaces for creative professionals of all disciplines. I seek to create a safe space for conversation, collaboration, connection, and education for people who find themselves in the “in between.” Most creatives rely on income from their professions and often hold multiple jobs in different sectors. I sought to create the space I wanted when I first began to discover I had creative interests outside of my 9-5. I specialize in creating experiences that appeal to the creative senses, including visual arts, crafting, and music, while creating space for connection amongst guests by engaging them with pointed conversation tools. I am most proud of the fact that I created a space for people like me and I created these connections through volunteering, podcasting, and going out of my comfort zone to meet people like me. What separates me from others is that I strive to bridge the gap between creativity and capitalism, not ignore it. I am aware that most creatives have professions outside of their passions and seek to help them thrive personally and professionally by providing connections, resources, and events to cater to both aspects.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
As a child, I loved to perform. Whether I was singing, songwriting, or dancing, I wanted to express myself loudly and with an audience clapping. I was always interested in 100 different things simultaneously and could learn a new skill quickly and then never pick it up again. My whole life, I wanted to explore the bounds of my abilities and always sought to challenge myself in learning new things as quickly as possible. I was also an avid reader and writer, and loved every single school subject, but especially science. I loved that science offered logical reasoning for the boundless questions I had for everything, and so I fell deeply in love with science and all of its disciplines.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/briaa.belle/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-pierre-b1b57522a
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/HllGISL0AwSKULVpaN
