The Endless Facets of Deanie Chen
USC Alumna, Lawyer, Artist
Towa Bird. Photo by Deanie Chen
Interview by Marissa Ding ft. Deanie Chen // Published November 28th, 2023
Deanie Chen is a USC and recent NYU School of Law graduate and professional photographer originally from Kansas and currently in New York City. In September, Chen and Co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Ding chatted over Zoom about intrinsic motivation, work-life balance, and Midwestern upbringings as children of immigrant parents. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
M: Could you introduce yourself?
D: I'm a photographer based in New York City. I guess that's how I primarily identify myself, but my other side of me is I just graduated from NYU Law, class of 2023. And I'm going to be working as a lawyer soon. I work as a photographer in everything from live music to touring to fashion and editorial. I mostly focus on live work and portrait and editorial work tied to music, but I do kind of everything.
M: And you were just on tour with the band Lawrence right?
D: That's why I'm in LA actually. The last date that I was on tour, we played Dodger Stadium. And so I was like, “If I'm gonna have to do this flight back to New York, I might as well just stay in LA for a week.” So I’ve been at a friend's house crashing on their couch for a little bit.
M: Has it been nice to just hopefully relax for a little bit?
D: Yeah it's been really nice to relax. I'm fitting in a few gigs, but with way less frequency than when I'm based in New York or when I'm traveling for work. The first few days after I got off tour I was kind of just comatose for 2 days straight, like literally just sleeping, which is really nice, but I fly back so I can start my big girl job. So I think sleep is going to be of the essence.
M: Are you going to be working in New York as a lawyer?
D. Yeah.
M: I wanted to ask– do you think your music interests and your law interests have intersected at all? What kind of practice are you going to be?
D: I thought about it. So when I applied to law school, I wrote about being a music photographer and how that would intersect with law. And upon going to law school, I've realized my interest in law and interest in music do overlap. But there is a very narrow way to actually make that true. A, I would have to move back to L.A., and B, in order to get to work in music law, you have to do a couple of years in a big firm and just do corporate [law] first to gain the skill set. In my case, I'm going to just try to do a few years or a year of law, pay off my loans, and see where that takes me. I have explored the possibility of diving head first into law and then trying to do the music law aspect but there are so few music law positions that I would be comfortable doing that would give me the life balance of doing photography and creative work – because working in a firm will never give you that work-life balance. The only other option is working in-house at a label or at a company, and I could never in good conscience work at a label as a lawyer. That would destroy me, I think.
So I think after going to law school, working in music in something non-creative would probably be so soul-sucking because it'd be so close to what I actually want to do. It's still far, but just close enough that it's tempting. So I actually like having a little bit of separation between my creative endeavors, even as a job and my intellectual endeavors.
Turnstile. Photo by Deanie Chen
M: I totally get that, being pre-med and all. Did you start off in undergrad knowing you were going to go pre-law?
D: Yeah, I didn't do photography going to college early at all. So I didn't even know that was an option.
M: I've also been thinking about that overlap with pre-med because I think there are definitely things that connect between taking a meaningful portrait of someone and talking to patients and getting to know someone beyond the reason why they're in the hospital, but there is less overlap in terms of other things related to photos so I definitely get you with that intellectual separation.
D: I feel like that's not a bad thing. One of our close family friends is one of the top heart surgeons in the Midwest. And he has a fascination with literature and he loves reading and writing, and he was talking to my dad, who has a PhD in English, and they could have all these conversations about books. To me, I've always been kind of an all-or-nothing person. Going to college, I felt like in order for my passions to be valid, I had to dive head first and make that my entire life, and I either had to do photo full time or be a lawyer and commit to that fully. But I learned that you don’t have to be defined by one passion or one commitment or one path to be valid in that. I feel like in art a lot of times people don't treat you like you're a real artist if you're not fully committed to it, like having a corporate out or a backup plan. But now that I've gotten older and I can view things with more reality, the law stuff has not stopped me from being able to do the work in the way that I want to in photography. It has limited me in some ways, but it also has made me really conscious with the remaining time I have.
M: How did you keep going in college and in grad school while balancing tens of hours of working in photo at the same time? What kept you going through that?
D: Short answer, a lot of caffeine. Like I have a horrible caffeine addiction so a lot of caffeine and not a lot of sleep. But I think the core of it is how I'm very defined by my commitment to my family, and I am still selfish enough that I have a full commitment to myself as well. I'm an only child of immigrants, and I resented my parents for a long time because they really wanted me to become a lawyer or pursue one of those classic Asian-kid careers. I'm not a STEM girl, so social sciences was the way to go. I always knew I needed to do this for my parents, to go to grad school. This was always the plan.
Photo was a little side quest. When I entered college I really wanted to find something that made me tick. I had hyperfixations on different hobbies for a couple of months or a year, and then I would lose interest and find something new. When I discovered music photography in particular, I fell in love with it so hard and it was so addicting. I wanted to devote every single minute of free time that I had to it. And so my life was kind of split into 2 halves. I was doing this photo thing genuinely for me. It was the first thing I've ever found that made me tick and I was like, “This is something I genuinely want to fight and get better at because I love it.” And then the law thing was always ever present because of my parents. I had a lot of pressure from them, but also I wanted to fulfill that.
So I guess those two motivations, because they were separate, propelled me to get through both of them. And I think it was one of those things where I wanted both really badly for separate reasons. I think if you have enough motivation to get something done, you can do it, and the motivation doesn't have to be the same. My motivation to be better at photo is definitely stronger, so I got very good at learning how to do the bare minimum in school and still get what I needed to get done and devote basically all that time to photos. So I got very good at shuffling time over from school stuff to photo and still keeping my grades up and knowing when I had to give a little bit more time and effort to academics. But I think at the core, if you have true reasons that keep you wanting to do something, I think you can. I think anyone can absolutely balance whatever they need. And there are people who balance things that are much more difficult than what I had to do.
Olivia Rodrigo. Photo by Deanie Chen
M: Yeah, that means a lot. The immigrant story also really resonates because my parents are immigrants from China and came to Minnesota right away.
D: The immigrant to Midwest pipeline.
M: Oh yeah, I want to touch on your path to LA and then to New York. Do you think that growing up in the Midwest and then making your way to a big city – did that shift influence your journey at all?
D: Yeah, definitely. I think that's also why I didn't get into music photography earlier. I was one of the few Asian kids in a class of like 600. I was always really conscious that I was different. I got to high school and I finally could figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I feel like the standard is you go to school in-state and you go get married, ring by spring. And you stay in Kansas and that's the accepted route. And in a sense I felt like I couldn't really talk about my goals because no one believed – like that was just so uncommon. So it was that mindset where everyone was like, “Don't get your hopes up. Like you're probably just gonna stay here.” But also being very different propelled me. I was like, “I need to leave because I've never fit in here. I want something more with my life and this predetermined path isn't for me anyway.” Moving to LA was definitely a culture shock. Being in a place with so much diversity, it was crazy. I thought, “Okay, here I'm just another person. I don't have to worry about fitting in and then after that I can figure out who I am.” It was wonderful feeling so normal and ordinary for the first time in my life.
The first show I actually shot though was in Kansas City. I went home for the summer after freshman year and just brought a camera to small bars and got involved that summer with music photographers in Kansas City. But the change from the Midwest to the big city influenced my growth as an individual beyond my career so hugely. That was what propelled me to figure out what I was gonna do with my life because I had no idea. I'd never really thought about it. In high school, the only thing I wanted to do was leave.
M: I really feel that. In my freshman year of high school I wrote a letter to myself and my one goal was that I wanted to go to college out of state. I didn’t even have a school – I was just like “I need to get out of here.” So that definitely resonates. Could you describe your routine throughout your academic experience in balancing shooting with classes? Like roughly how many hours per week for each thing and things like that.
D: The first year when I got into it in undergrad, I was shooting maybe 2 or 3 shows a week, editing for like 8 hours, and then doing portrait shoots on campus. Once I got deep into it junior year, I started working basically full-time, like 40 hours a week in L.A. around venues, doing gigs everywhere. That was when I really had to balance my time. I picked big lectures and I would try to go to class if I could. I also scheduled most of my classes before evening because I knew I had to probably Uber somewhere to go do a show. I planned my life in school around the fact that I would have to build some space out for photo. So I would just edit in class all the time, and most evenings I would eat dinner and then go do a show or something, and come back. If I had time, I would go see a friend if it was a weekend, and then I would come back and edit and kind of just rinse and repeat. If I was shooting most days of a week, the commute would be an hour-ish and then the shoot would be an hour-ish and then editing would be like 4 hours because I'm a slower editor.
M: No, me too.
D: What was really great about undergrad is that there is rigidity, but there is a lot of flexibility. You can definitely build your schedule around your hobbies. And I skipped a lot of class. There was no way around that. Like I did not go to class in my last years at USC. And I got very good at cramming. That's how I balanced it. I wasn't super involved on campus. I was really only in Trojan Marketing Group. Other than that, I was like, “I'm just here to get good grades because that's what I need for law school.”
boygenius. Photo by Deanie Chen
M: Overall, would you say your multifaceted identity growing up in the Midwest and being Asian American plays a role in the space you want to create in the industry?
D: Yeah, I'm very conscious of being multifaceted. I'm a very proud Midwesterner. It's really affected how I view the world. What changed is when I was in Kansas, I was ashamed of being Asian. When I was in LA and USC, I was ashamed of being middle class and from the Midwest. I think being a photographer was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me in a sense of giving myself self-worth. Prior, I’ve always felt like, “Yeah, I'm over here doing my parents’ dream, I don't really know what I'm doing but at least pursuing that gives me some value.”
And then all the other parts of my intersectionality of being a woman and being Asian and being from the Midwest, which is an odd combo when you move to USC, are things I'm really proud of because my background gives me a way of viewing the world differently, even if it doesn't necessarily show through my art. Being these identities has helped me connect with artists or with other people when I work. I really connect with female artists, I really connect with artists from the Midwest. And I think that has helped me in my art in many ways and in the space that I wanna occupy. I hope that I can just be someone who is very proudly Midwestern or very proudly Asian and a woman doing my job well. I hope I can validate our existence in this space.
Another element of myself – being a lawyer and having done the whole thing for my parents or having done a professional career thing. I also want to give validation to people that because you're not a quintessential starving artist and you aren’t devoting your whole heart and soul – that doesn't make your art less valid. I don't come from a background that gives me a fallback. I’m an only child, and both my parents waited until I graduated law school to retire. And I'm the only income stream now in our family. So if I failed as a music photographer and my parents had a health issue and they couldn't afford it, I would be absolutely useless. That reality has always grounded me in the fact that I have to have a backup. It may not be the romantic story of being that artist that I always wanted to be, doing art full-time and really committing my whole life to it. But I think that’s reality. You just have to temper your dreams. When you don't have a fallback, that's unfortunately something you have to take into account.
And of course I felt really bitter. I felt really bitter to my parents. I was really angry for a while. And I think that's a lot of what a lot of first-gen Asian Americans face. Because we usually don't realize art is even a possibility until later in life. I no longer hold onto that bitterness, a bitterness I view as an essential growing pain of getting older. These choices, while in a perfect world, I may have made different ones, are undeniably things I willingly and actively chose because of the things that matter to me in life.
I hope people just look at me and in the worst case even if they don't like my art, even if they have no interest in being a lawyer, see me and are like, “OK, I'm valid as a [insert job here]. I'm valid for what I need to do to face the reality of life. That doesn't make me less of an artist.”
That's a part that I can play a small role in, I hope. Other than that, I'm just going to keep working as much as I can in music and art because I love it and hopefully someday I can help bring up my friends who are really talented and really passionate and good people and slowly that will build the industry with more good people. That’s the big picture dream.
@deaniechen on Instagram
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