Inspiring Stories from Pasadena

The heart of our mission at VoyageLA is to find the amazing souls that breathe life into our city. In the recent weeks we’ve had the privilege to connect with some of Pasadena’s finest artists, creatives, entrepreneurs and rabble rousers and we can’t begin to express how impressed we are with our city’s incredibly deep talent pool.  Check out the Pasadena’s rising stars below.

Hermann Binek

Hermann Binek is a globally recognized security expert with decades of experience protecting governments, corporations, and high-profile individuals in high-risk environments. With a career spanning elite military, law enforcement, and private security operations, he has successfully prevented three government-level assassination attempts, neutralized kidnapping plots, and designed comprehensive security protocols for some of the world’s most demanding clients. Read more>>

Delia Farizath

My journey with hair extensions actually started when I was 17. I had a bad haircut and a bleaching process that damaged my natural hair, so I tried extensions and they completely changed my life. They didn’t just fix my hair; they gave me back my confidence. That experience opened a path I never expected would become my passion. Read more>>

GLEN MCNAMARA

We started at Chick’s Sporting Goods, which had a ‘team room’ that sold letterman jackets as well as uniforms and equipment for local youth groups and high schools. They were purchased by Dick’s Sporting Goods, who closed the department in 2015. We collaborated with their private embroidery department to continue the business on our own. Read more>>

Haotian Dong

To be honest, I wasn’t born into a family steeped in the arts. My grandparents were both chemistry teachers, while my parents worked as businesspeople and civil servants. Growing up in such an environment, I naturally followed the path of many Chinese students—never imagining I’d pursue a career in art or design. Later, my family decided to send me to the U.S. Read more>>

DC Wedding Collective

I’ve always enjoyed telling a great story. I remember begging my English teachers back in High School to allow me and a couple of friends to create a video instead of writing an essay about a topic. Read more>>

Robert Divney

I literally started I the mailroom. I have been in the music business all my life, as a musician, music retail, promotion, management and marketing. In 2018, I started Pasadena Records to help musicians that made albums on their own and needed a home to help with marketing and promotion. Read more>>

Tharun Saravanakumar

My first foray into art was drawing my favorite characters from movies, TV shows, and cartoons I watched as a child. This naturally transitioned into a burning passion for filmmaking. This passion built up my confidence to pursue filmmaking through and through. Even though it was a hassle to convince my family, they knew that this art form meant the world to me. Read more>>

Gena Jongsukkijpanich

Hi everyone, I’m Gena! I’m a concept artist and designer from Thailand currently based in Pasadena. I’ve always loved art and storytelling, especially anything that involved imagining new worlds. That interest led me to study art more seriously and eventually build a career in visual development and concept design. Read more>>

Camille Leon

Back when I was working a corporate gig in downtown LA, I asked my co-workers for referrals to an acupuncturist. Read more>>

Claire Davis

I’ve always had creativity running in my blood. My whole family is creative. Just like some people follow their family line into medicine or law, I followed mine into the studio. My parents used to work in the film industry, my twin sister is an animator, and my brother is a music producer. Being an artist is the natural path in my family. Read more>>

Amanda Peter

I’ve been in the entertainment business for over 15 years as an actress, host, voice over talent, pageant and career coach. Almost a couple of years ago, I became the new owner of 3-2-1 Acting Studios, alongside my husband. Read more>>

I AM KASSANDRA

I started learning to make music in high school when I felt that my friend group’s backyard wrestling federation just NEEDED custom-made entrance songs. I started using my new hobby to make goofy songs which I distributed around my school, some rapper kids started asking me to make beats, so I started recording full tracks for them using a usb clip-on computer mic. Read more>>

Yuri Lee

I am a dog enthusiast, trainer, walker, caregiver, and foster. I started off as a dog lover and then it eventually became dog owner, and then it became dog rescuer. One of those rescues, Huckleberry Finn, aka Huck the husky, is my 10 year old husky who has put me through nearly every single dog experience, good and bad, a dog owner can experience. Read more>>

Viridian Van Buskirk

I always find the task of describing my story as a rather daunting one. I get a bit lost in explaining all the twists, turns, and crashes that my life has had thus far (who’s hasn’t?) that I struggle a bit to pinpoint exactly where it all truly “started.” Essentially, I have always been an artist; a general creative, more broadly speaking. Read more>>

Jill Cepela

Like many LA folks, I moved to this fine city to pursue a career in entertainment. And I got so lucky – I clawed my way into some of the coolest jobs in the industry, met incredibly talented people and comedy legends, and got free parking at The Grove. For a while, this was a perfect fit. Slowly then all at once, I burned out. Read more>>

Desiree Sayarath

I had been working remotely for about four years and was ready for a career change. At the same time, my family and I had been saving money to buy a home, but unfortunately, despite our savings, it was still something we could not afford. Read more>>

Fana Misa

Music is my dream. I grew up with ABBA records playing on Sunday mornings, amazing soundtracks in video games, and a piano in my room. I started teaching myself in the summer of 2018 in Belgrade, Serbia. It was like an outlet to me–if I was happy, I’d play brightly and energetically. If I was feeling frustrated, I’d play messily and brunt. Read more>>

Lucy Loken

I was always a very outgoing kid – always ready to put on a show for whoever I could get to sit and watch. I was obsessed with musicals, like ‘Grease’ and ‘The Sound of Music.’ I would put them on our TV and sing and dance along with the characters on screen. Read more>>

Max Roark

I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t grow up in a household of musicians but my parents were avid music fans, my father especially. In middle school I had the opportunity to start learning an instrument so I chose clarinet, and started playing in the middle school band. Read more>>

Cindy Chen

Growing up, I was always called “bossy” just for taking initiative or “sensitive” just for expressing emotion—but boys around me were praised for being “assertive” and “leaders.” Those labels made me retreat and question myself. But eventually I realized that the moments that made me feel small—being dismissed or underestimated—were exactly why I needed to speak up. Read more>>

Pinki Durongdej

We are a family owned business! We decided to open a restaurant when we walked by our current place. It was the perfect spot, not too big and in a good location. We wanted to bring a new local spot to our hometown. Our story begins long before our doors opened. Cooking has always been the love language of our family. Read more>>

Susan Lin

I am currently a senior concept artist in the game industry, specializing in environment and prop design. I’ve loved animation since I was a child, and I even took drawing classes in elementary school because of that interest. As I grew older, my passion for anime and games inspired me to create my own sketches and draw my favorite characters in my spare time. Read more>>

Melanie Grace, C.Ht

I always say my life has been a collision of contradictions — beauty and brutality, joy and heartbreak, divine protection and unthinkable danger — all tangled together in ways I never asked for, but somehow needed. Altadena and Pasadena shaped me long before I knew I’d spend my life helping others rewrite the stories they’ve been surviving for far too long. Read more>>

Daisy Rosas Vargas

I was always interested in science. I would ask the question: how does this happen and why? Why did the leaves change colors, why do some of the stars twinkle. I was lucky to go to a STEM camp in the summer of 7th grade, Tech Trek. This fueled my curiosity for science, specifically chemistry. Read more>>

James Deveney, Sara Beko

James started his film career producing low budget independent films in his 20s, and then creating his internationally popular movie podcast, Raiders of the Lost Podcast, in 2020. Since then, the podcast has soared to a top show in TV and Film, but he has also produced and assistant directed other independent productions. Read more>>

Elizabeth Chaidez

I am a proud daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico, my mother migrated to Los Angeles for a better life. She raised me and my siblings in the San Fernando Valley as a single mother, and worked extremely hard to provide for us. Read more>>

Charlotte Bjornbak

I actually began my creative journey far from Hollywood—on stage in Denmark. Theater was my first love, and those early stage performances, shaped not only my craft, but also my understanding of storytelling. After moving to the U.S., I continued training with a variety of acting schools and coaches, each of whom helped me broaden my abilities as a performer. Read more>>

Zilia Zhou

Chanova Design didn’t start as a perfectly mapped-out business plan. It started with a moment that shook everything loose. When the Eaton Fire nearly burned down my family’s home, it forced me to look at what actually matters in a space: safety, resilience, intention, and how a home holds the people inside it. Before that, I’d already been orbiting the design world for years. Read more>>

Nikka Marie Pisigan-Camarena

We each struggled in different and complex ways that I couldn’t fully understand while young. We sought therapy during our roughest times, but I remember feeling like we were fighting a losing battle because it felt like most providers really struggled to understand us and our experience. While I hold so much gratitude and appreciation for the providers who worked hard to help, my younger self really just wished for someone who could more authentically connect with my family and really see us for all that we were. Read more>>

Maggie Moon

Like so many health professionals, there was a lot of burnout. There’s an internal drive to do things the right way and be the person others can look to for answers. This is what makes us good at what we do, but it also makes health professionals particularly prone to burnout. The data backs me up on this, unfortunately. Read more>>

Keveen Baudouin

I was born in a small town in the southwest of France called Brive. After a fairly normal childhood and teenage years, during which I started playing music at the age of eight (I had a dream that I was playing music one summer and decided to start that following month out of the blue). Read more>>

TJ Teems

I started out as a math teacher, loving curriculum development and working with people. While I loved my time as a teacher, I realized that I was drawn most to the psychological development of my students, which motivated me shift my career and pursue a Masters’ Degree in Counseling. Read more>>