People usually stop believing Helsinki-based lawyer Lauren Turner (B.A. ’03) when she explains her trajectory from dancer to lawyer with fashion merchandiser, online furniture sales, the criminal tribunal in The Hague, and music video choreographer for a Finnish pop star in between. But who wouldn’t be skeptical?
“It’s all so surprising, but I feel like every bit of education brought me to the next thing,” says Turner.
Shortly after Turner enrolled in an art school to study dance she realized she wasn’t going to have a career as a dancer and decided to choose something that blended creativity and business. After experiencing a “cold, competitive” environment at her first art school, Turner says “VCUarts felt like a safe place to be creative. There’s a lot of talent and not a lot of ego, just chilled out people doing what they love to do.”
Turner found the Fashion Merchandising major to be the perfect business/creative mix, “and I’ve been straddling that line ever since,” she says. She enjoyed the responsibility given to her, for creative projects like producing the senior runway show. “I’ve used that a lot in my work. Every supervisor I’ve had has commented on my creative approach.”
Today Turner works for a virtual law firm with a focus on intellectual property and general corporate law (and she choreographs music videos and commercials on the side). Much of her work has her advising artists and helping them navigate turning a skill into a service, such as an e-book or instructional web series.
“We’re lawyers but we end up giving a lot of business advice – we help clients with contracts but we also say, ‘what type of systems do you have in place that you can monetize?’”
Turner finds that many artists fail to realize how much intellectual property they’re generating, and then fail to protect it.
“It makes you vulnerable as an artist.”
“There’s so much more opportunity now for artists to be successful entrepreneurs. If you can be a little smarter about doing business and protecting your intellectual property then you have the time to paint.”
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