After graduating college, Samantha landed her first real-world, 9-5 job—an accomplishment any university/college graduate would be proud of. However, something didn’t exactly feel right. “Once I did manage to snag a 9-5 gig at a local marketing agency, I quickly realized it wasn’t all I made it out to be,” says Samantha, a freelance marketing writer and blogger from Orlando, Florida.
Hello! I’m Lucy, I live in East London with my French partner and we have two children. We also run The Wern together out of our garden office where we do PR & branding for start-ups and entrepreneurs. I’m on “maternity leave” or whatever that looks like when you also run your own business. I’m not doing any paid-for client work but doing lots of guest articles, interviews like this and workshops to promote my book “Hype Yourself” which is coming out in January.
Originally from a rural town outside of Tampa, Florida, there was nothing global, worldly, nor ambitious in my upbringing. By all accounts, my family’s expectations were pretty low and stopped at “go to college.” So I had no pressure to do anything big, and had complete support in everything that has lead me to where I am now. I had been introduced to the art world pretty early on. By the time I was 15, my whole life was centered around being creative. Little did I know that the courses I enrolled in and the pure act of creating was shaping a mind that questioned everything and that quickly saw a flaw in the traditional work/life model.
My name is Emilie Giles – I generally describe myself as an artist/ researcher/ producer. I’m currently working on a PhD with the Open University exploring how e-textiles (electronic textiles) can be used as tangible tools for blind and visually impaired people, and also how they can make their own personalised interactive art pieces using crafting methods.
The short version is that I am an English major who wanted to be a writer. After graduating from college, I won a honeybee hive in a raffle. Keeping bees is strangely addictive and before I knew it, I was pursuing a career as a honeybee scientist. Bees have taken me all over the world: Germany, Ireland, Wales, France and New Zealand, where beekeepers hosted me in their homes for a month. Some day they’ll take me to China, Australia and Thailand.
I’m Samantha Pennington, the sci-fi and fantasy novel obsessed, revolutionarily inclined, and oh so queer entrepreneur behind Oree Virtual. Oree Virtual is a full-service digital agency serving women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ changemakers that want to shift the status quo and become the majority in business and leadership. We help build our client’s brand authority, trust, and visibility online. I’m also the co-founder of the largest community of women in SEO, the Facebook group Sisters in SEO.
Project Anywhere 