Episode 232: Creativity, Courage & Reinvention

So how does someone stay relevant while the people who started alongside them quietly drop off the map? On this episode of Dream Big with Big Dreamers, Donna Serdula sits down with Monika, an internationally awarded portrait photographer and creative entrepreneur based in Chicago, to find out.

The answer has less to do with talent than you would expect. It is mostly about the things that never make the highlight reel: persistence, empathy, and the nerve to say yes before you know how.

Who is Monika Demel?

Monika Demel is an internationally awarded portrait photographer and visual artist based in Chicago, though she travels worldwide for portrait work. She has earned more than 14 Portrait Masters awards, exhibited at the Louvre, and built over two decades of creative leadership across portrait, commercial, and corporate photography.

She also holds a degree in human behavior, which turns out to be the quiet engine behind everything else she does.

The dream that started in a stranger’s living room

Monika came to the United States from Poland as a kid, always drawing, always making something. The moment that set her course happened while she was babysitting at 16. The parents were out, the kids were asleep, and she wandered the apartment and found it full of striking drawings and creative gadgets. Then she spotted a storyboard mockup and could not look away.

When the couple got home, she asked about it. The dad explained he was a creative director in advertising. That was it. “As soon as he said it, in my head I was like, that’s what I want,” she recalls. “I was made for this.”

She had been living inside that world her whole life. She just did not have a name for it until she saw it in someone else’s home.

How do you stay relevant as a creative for decades?

“In this business, 24 years is like multiple lifetimes,” Monika says. She has watched nearly everyone who started when she did disappear. The industry is cutthroat, and it thins itself out.

What keeps her in it is not a secret technique. It is relationships, and a refusal to stand still. She started in film, bought her first digital camera the moment the technology arrived, and has kept experimenting ever since.

There is a catch, though, and it is the part most creatives get wrong. Staying fresh does not mean out-creating your client. “People get super creative sometimes, but nobody wants that,” she says. “The average consumer is completely overwhelmed by it.”

The job is to keep the work new while staying tuned to what people actually want. As Donna puts it, you cannot land on the message until you know what the audience needs to know and wants to hear.

“It’s all about relationships and constantly staying ahead of the pack.”

The $13,000 job nobody else would take

Here is the story that says the most about how Monika works. Someone in one of her groups needed a mural photographed before a move. Nobody wanted the job. The space was unknown, the lighting was a gamble, and there was too much that could go wrong.

Monika had never photographed a mural on a wall in her life. She said yes anyway, showed up, and figured it out on site. It became a $13,000 commission, and the client was thrilled.

“I got it because everyone said no,” she says. “They didn’t want to take the risk. I took it.” The lesson is not recklessness. It is that the thing everyone avoids is often the opening nobody else is willing to walk through.

What does it mean to lead with empathy?

Monika calls empathy her superpower, and she means it as a working method, not a nice sentiment. Her degree is in human behavior, and it shows up in small reflexes. When someone cuts her off in traffic, her instinct is not anger but curiosity: I wonder what’s going on with them. Maybe they just got bad news. Maybe it has nothing to do with her at all.

That same reflex is what makes her portraits work. “I see everything when I’m photographing somebody,” she says. “The things they’re not saying, the things they don’t want to go to.”

If she cannot connect with a person emotionally, the photos come out flat, and worse, the subject does not recognize themselves in them. Connection is not the soft part of the work. It is the whole job.

“Every time I don’t connect with someone, it’s not a good outcome.”

Resilience without the victim mindset

Monika does not romanticize where she came from. Growing up half in Poland and half in the U.S. in the 1980s meant bullying and the casual “dumb Polack” jokes that were everywhere at the time. It meant scarcity too, the kind where you wait all day in line for a single piece of meat. Later came infertility and domestic violence.

She names all of it plainly, and then refuses the label. “I’m not a victim mindset person,” she says. What the hardship gave her instead was range. She can meet almost anyone where they are, because she has probably been somewhere near there herself.

How does Monika define legacy?

Donna’s favorite closing question is about the end of life, and it turns out to be Monika’s favorite too. Her answer is not what you would expect from someone with work in the Louvre.

In a hundred years, she points out, almost none of us will be remembered. So legacy is not fame. It is joy, delivered in small, ordinary doses, day after day.

She has a family and seven grandkids, and her measure is simple: if you do one small good thing for someone every day, that is 365 a year. It compounds.

Which brings back the line that runs through the whole conversation. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Donna knows that one well; her own father used it to get her through more than one hard thing. You rarely feel the progress until, all at once, there is a lot of it.

“It’s cumulative. Every day you do one good thing for someone, that’s 365 a year.”

What is Monika’s next big dream?

Italy. “I may be 100 percent Polish, but my heart is 100 percent Italian,” she says. The first time she visited, her reaction was immediate: these are my people.

Notice what the dream actually is, though. It is not more output or a bigger studio. It is presence. The espresso, the pastries, the slower pace, the habit of enjoying the moment instead of measuring it. After 24 years of doing, her big dream is being.

Advice for creatives who are doubting the path

Monika’s advice is direct. First, stop comparing yourself to someone 25 years in. That comparison is rigged, and it will only talk you out of starting.

Then learn everything. Not just your craft, but your tools. When she got her camera, she learned exactly what that instrument could do and how far she could push it, which is how she found things like in-camera double exposures to play with. Every new tool after that taught her how much further she could go.

And put in the hours. She is a believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hours idea, done however you can get them, an hour here and an hour there.

Most of all, do it for the love of it before you do it for the money. “Just keep going,” she says. “Do it for the joy of it.”

Monika’s brand has outlasted trends because she knows exactly who she is and who she serves. If your own brand is not that clear yet, see how Vision Board Media helps.