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"When Katelyn KaRese was growing up outside of Detroit, school wasn&amp;#039;t easy. She just wanted to get out of town and be creative. She made her way to New York, bouncing around jobs in film production and bartending to pay the rent. Now she owns a studio that makes it possible for indie artists and filmmakers to afford to see their projects and creative visions become reality. Katelyn talked to Cosmopolitan.com about saying yes to challenges, working for what you want, and the value of learning to hustle.  I was a shy, creative kid growing up, and I was dyslexic \u2014 when I first learned to read, I was literally reading books completely backwards. I was labeled special ed at one point. By the time I was in 10th grade, I thought I had learned everything I was going to learn. I think I had 30 percent attendance throughout high school. Creative endeavors, like art and theater and the memorization of lines, were things I always excelled at. But anything academic was foreign territory for me. I struggled so much with it. I wanted to leave my hometown, so immediately after graduating high school, I took off to California and stayed with my cousin. After a couple of months, I moved to the Florida Keys, where I worked on a fishing boat and learned how to bartend. I did that for about eight months, then moved back home \u2014 I didn&amp;#039;t have any real direction and was looking for the next move. When you grow up in the Midwest, every movie you watch has New York City in it, and it was so different from where I was from. So I moved to New York right before my 19th birthday.  I got bartending jobs, and I was working in one sports bar/restaurant in Hell&amp;#039;s Kitchen that was sorely undermanaged, so I was the waitress, the hostess, the bartender, and the manager, and the place was always packed. One night, there was a guy sitting at the bar with two of his crew members \u2014 they had been working on a film. The guy started talking to me, and he said, &amp;quot;I see you running around here, and you&amp;#039;re not even breaking a sweat. How are you doing that?&amp;quot; I was like, &amp;quot;Well, I have to pay the rent.&amp;quot; He asked if I was interested in film and TV production. I said sure, and he gave me a business card. He said to show up at an address at a particular time in two days. As a female bartender in New York City, you get lots of business cards, so I didn&amp;#039;t think much of it in the moment. But when the time for the meeting came, I ended up going. I thought it might be a job interview, but when I arrived at the address, I was in Times Square at the Viacom building \u2014 he had sent me to MTV. I walked in, and they put me right on the crew of Making the Band, P. Diddy&amp;#039;s show, as a production assistant (PA). They paid me $100 a day \u2014 I didn&amp;#039;t realize it at the time, but I was lucky to be paid, since many networks don&amp;#039;t pay interns or PAs at all. The work was intense. They made me drive a 16-person crew van all over the city \u2014 I had never driven in New York before. We had 6 a.m. call times, and I would work 12-hour days and then go bartend. After MTV, I worked at VH1 and at Bravo as a PA, making connections along the way. For three years I worked seven days a week, and many nights I was getting home at 6 a.m. and getting up two hours later for a casting call, and I lived in neighborhoods all over New York \u2014 Washington Heights, Bed-Stuy, West New York \u2014 doing anything I could to stay in the city. My next jump was into indie filmmaking. I worked on a horror film about vampires, which was very heavy in the creative department, with lots of blood and gore and masks. When I met the filmmakers, they were having problems funding the project, so I started reaching out to the contacts I made over the years and asked them if they might be interested in investing in the film. Ultimately, we raised enough money to do the treatment and then more money for the full feature film, called The Lower Angels. That was my first introduction to guerrilla filmmaking and being part of a production process, and it fueled, like, 40 other projects. I took all my savings and bought a 5D Mark II camera so I could work on my own projects and also lend the camera out to others. I was still bartending and freelancing for larger companies to make money.  I am a huge believer in fate, and every person who has made a turn in my career has come to me completely randomly. I would meet people through a particular project and sometimes they&amp;#039;d come to me later and ask if I wanted to be a part of something else. Fifty percent of what I did, I did for free \u2014 mostly stuff I cared about. I got paid for the more commercial projects I worked on. That&amp;#039;s why I have such a large book of people who call me all the time \u2014 I almost never said no, and I always came through. Even if I had to turn down a job, I would always find someone else to relay it to. I&amp;#039;ve always been a photography hobbyist, and one day I saw a job posting on Craigslist for Sante D&amp;#039;Orazio&amp;#039;s studio. Sante was a major photographer in &amp;#039;90s, shooting all the big models \u2014 there are photos of Kate Moss all over the studio. I ending up working in his studio, coordinating shoots, managing the archives, and doing other projects. That was the first time both of the producers above me were female \u2014 Sante is the photographer, but he has a staff. Working under other women was the first time in my career path that I was actually challenged and made to excel in a coordinating producer&amp;#039;s position. I was scrutinized for every little thing \u2014 the producers challenged me on how I would lay out art in an email or how I would speak to people on the phone, everything from the most basic to the major. In the end, that was the most helpful thing I ever encountered in the industry. As a PA, all my job experience came from watching other people. This was the first position where I had someone teach me the correct way to do something and then expect me to do it. I did a stint in editorial with that studio and commercials as well \u2014 we did a Starbucks commercial \u2014 and then I moved almost fully into commercial production, the kind of branded ad content you see on TV or in magazines. I also started doing some assistant directing, coordinating producing, and working in different roles on a film production crew until I had played pretty much every position on a set. I had worked with so many different people at that point that I was getting calls when someone needed a location to shoot, a camera to shoot on, or a PA. I would help connect people to the right resources; at one point I think I was handling like six different projects at once and bartending full time. About two and a half years ago, I got played out on working seven days a week and only making barely my rent and feeding myself and exerting myself for so many years and never really climbing the ladder financially. When you work on production, your day rates vary, and when you&amp;#039;re a freelancer, work is not always dependable. I always bolstered my income by bartending and working in restaurants, but that takes up most of your life, since in New York City, it means working until 6 a.m. As a bartender, I was never short a social life, as I was surrounded by people when I was working. But working seven days a week both during the day in production and at night in the bar did take a heavy toll on my health. I was hospitalized and ill to the point my hair started falling out and grew back in gray in some spots. So I decided to step back a little, because I wasn&amp;#039;t really sure if everything I was doing in the industry was going to get me anywhere.   I went home to Michigan and started to think about what I wanted. While I was there, I had a hairdresser friend who took over a loft in downtown Detroit and wanted to create a concept for her salon, and we came up with the idea of having a studio in the salon that would specialize in photography portraits. We built out a studio space in the loft, and we connected with photographers in the area to have them bring their shoots into the space. They could have hair and makeup done at the salon and then shoot in the studio. The concept really worked, and it sparked my interest in owning a studio in New York City. I moved back to New York with the idea that I was going to have a studio space. I wanted it to be a collective space where other production companies, talent management companies, and people who needed studio space would be able to rent out sections of the studio and use it for their advantage while helping to offset the crazy New York City rent costs. I started working on my business plan and looking at spaces, and while I&amp;#039;m doing this, I go for a walk one day and get hit by a car. I was bedridden for a month and had to go through lots of physical therapy. It was a huge moment: I realized I just had to survive. I just had to get through it. While I was bedridden, I worked on my business plan. I Googled &amp;quot;business plan&amp;quot; to figure out how to develop one. I barely finished high school, I didn&amp;#039;t go to college, I struggled with reading and writing my whole life, and I still get things wrong when I&amp;#039;m writing emails. But I knew people who were financially successful in the industry, so I would ask them to critique my business plan and I&amp;#039;d make corrections and then go to another person and they would critique me again. Making a business plan wasn&amp;#039;t all that different from figuring out a budget for a film, which I had done before. Luckily, many of the wonderful people I had worked with through the years came through for me and got me remote office positions in their production companies to help get me by while I was injured. I had a laptop, so I worked from bed. I had to cut bartending out of my life for the first time, which was my biggest financial support system, and that fueled my drive in creating the studio.  Once I could walk, I went looking for spaces. I probably looked at 100 of them. The way I actually found one was a bit serendipitous. I was back to bartending and working at Fat Baby, a bar and club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which had a comedy show once a week. A scout came to see the show and we started chatting, and he said he was part of a company called Bouwerie Lane, which was a building developer, and he also had a comedic talent business, CH Entertainment. I told him I was looking for a space and sent him my business plan, the financials, and my budget. He showed me a space on Bowery, and from the moment I walked into this unfinished raw floor, I was like, This is the space, and we are going to make it work. I started a one-year venture of building out two floors of loft space into my studio, Studio 123 Bowery.  Initially I had an investor who was interested in my project, although I ended up not taking his money. I decided that if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it with the people who were actually hands-on involved. Financially, it&amp;#039;s a collective of people in the industry who make the space what it is. And throughout the process of building it, I would bartend four nights a week, bringing in $1,500 in cash every week, and I was living off nothing \u2014 most of my money went into building out the loft. Now I do rely heavily on my larger and commercial clients to rent the space for the full studio amount, which is still cheaper than any other studio in Manhattan. The studio build-out was a challenge. We ran into so many problems with the building. No heat in the winter, no AC in the summer. I just kept fighting for it because I had a vision of creating so many things in this little studio space. I stuck with the idea of a collective, placing people in the space to rent out office space and help subsidize the rent. The gentleman who helped me find the space used some of it for his talent management company. Another production company was leaving their studio in the financial district and looking for studio space for less money that they didn&amp;#039;t have to run themselves. Another production company is located in the Bronx and didn&amp;#039;t want to have to ask clients to go all the way up there, so they were looking for an affordable place in Manhattan. Some of the companies that use the studio operate out of the studio itself, and others come just to rent the studio for one project; others rely on me to produce their projects in the studio and outside the studio. The companies in-house get special rates and discounts and sometimes even free studio time to shoot their projects. In-house companies also receive commissions if the studio is booked through them and their clients. All these companies benefit from the studio and really use it for what it was meant for: making it feasible for productions and artists with small budgets to produce their work.  I get calls on a daily basis from amazing artists, photographers, and directors who have an idea they want to execute but don&amp;#039;t have funding. I provide them with a professional space for cheap or sometimes for trade. I help find people to work on their projects, pairing people together so they can make their art at a reasonable cost. We&amp;#039;re a third-floor walk-up, which makes the rent cheaper; it also means that if I have to walk equipment up and down the stairs for people, I do that. I paint the walls of the studio myself. I work on projects if they need an extra set of hands. We&amp;#039;ve only been open for a few months, but it&amp;#039;s been a really positive experience. As of now, I&amp;#039;m still a one-woman show. I clean the studio, I paint the studio, I prep the studio, and I do the marketing and the coordinating. I left bartending about six months ago, just before the studio opened, and I hope never to go back. I expected the indie artists, because that&amp;#039;s who I built the space for. But the big names started coming out to support us. Azalea Banks shot two music videos in the space. Odalisque magazine featured us in a jeans ad for their magazine. The online publication We the Urban featured us. We do a lot of product shoots for lookbooks. Lil&amp;#039; Cease, DJ Premier, and Saigon shot a video here. It&amp;#039;s really cool the amount of love the studio has gotten so far. I don&amp;#039;t have a goal in mind other than just to facilitate productions. Personally, I would like to start dabbling in more projects I&amp;#039;m creating myself, especially in documentary work on slightly more controversial subjects. I was working on a project with a friend on Planned Parenthood and the benefits of that organization and access to abortion and birth control; it&amp;#039;s been a slow process, but I&amp;#039;m still hoping to complete it at some point. I&amp;#039;d also like to produce something on the American prison system. My brother is in prison, so that&amp;#039;s an issue that&amp;#039;s of particular importance to me. That&amp;#039;s the stuff I like to do: highlighting real things that are going on in the world. I do love fiction, but documentaries have something interesting to offer. I hope as my career grows, people will take me more seriously and allow me to do interviews on bigger subjects. I just turned 28. I was telling people in the industry I was 30 for, like, five years, so I&amp;#039;m almost there. It&amp;#039;s amazing what you have to do as a young woman in this industry to get people to take you seriously.  I&amp;#039;ve always been a super wander-luster. My dream job would have to involve traveling. I would love to be a National Geographic photographer and go all over the world to all the craziest places and capture animals and people in their natural habitats. The U.S. is so closed off from the rest of the world, and I love experiencing things that are so different. In any career path, the best thing you can do is to remain resistant to negativity. People come up with ideas all day long that they think they can&amp;#039;t execute. If there&amp;#039;s something you believe in, you can create it. If you&amp;#039;re passionate about something, you have to go for it, but you have to understand that with every great thing comes a great struggle. If you can get through that, you&amp;#039;re golden. Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview. Follow Jill on Twitter.  Photo Credit: Diana Pappas. 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<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/news/a30634/get-that-life-katelyn-karese-production-studio/>