Do you have a killer eye for style that you want to turn into a career? The fashion and beauty media industry offers many opportunities beyond styling fashion shoots and writing beauty reviews, and you’ll find roles in public relations, editorial content, marketing, blogging, and social media. Get an inside look from media insiders who share how to break into this cutting-edge industry.
Daise Bedolla, Editor, Into The Gloss; Writer, I Just Want To Talk
Daise Bedolla is the editor whose fingerprints are all over modern beauty. Over the last decade, she has helped shape its language, taste, and identity—from New York magazine to Into The Gloss’ The Top Shelf, the cult column that became a cultural touchstone and helped launch Glossier. With bylines across VOGUE, The Cut, and Harper’s Bazaar, Daise has become a trusted authority not only on what beauty is, but where it’s going next. She now brings that same discerning eye to I Just Want To Talk, her newsletter that has quickly become essential reading among beauty insiders, earning praise from The Business of Fashion, CNN Style, Marie Claire, and other media.
Caroline Palmer, Author, Workhorse
Caroline Palmer was the Director of Editorial, Video and Social Media at Amazon Fashion until 2020.
Prior to her tenure at Amazon, she spent seven years as the Editor of Vogue.com, and her writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, LIFE, Seventeen Magazine, and Vogue.
She lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her husband and three children. Workhorse is her first novel.
Emilia Petrarca, Freelance Writer; Author, Shop Rat
Emilia Petrarca is a writer with over a decade of experience covering fashion and culture. Before going freelance in 2023, she held the full-time position of senior fashion writer for The Cut at New York Magazine. Her work has since been published by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and more. In 2023, Emilia launched a shopping newsletter on Substack called Shop Rat, which has over 30,000 subscribers.
Vanessa Santana, Director of Brand Marketing- fine'ry, Maesa
Vanessa Santana is a Director of Brand Marketing at Maesa, a beauty incubator. She currently leads brand marketing for fine'ry fragrance, the #1 fragrance brand in mass retail, and previously led brand marketing for TPH by Taraji P. Henson, MIX:BAR, and Anomaly by Priyanka Chopra — helping position TPH as one of the leading Black-owned haircare and body care brands. Before Maesa, Vanessa led Global Innovation & Engagement for Dove Hair at Unilever, where she drove purpose-driven product launches and cross-market strategies for one of the world's most iconic beauty brands. Prior to Unilever, she worked at General Mills, scaling major snack brands like Gushers and Chex Mix. She built the foundation of her early career in media and consumer insights at Nielsen and NBCUniversal. Vanessa is fueled by creativity, storytelling & connection. When she's not brand-building, she enjoys traveling, sports & quality time with family.
Moderator: Syreeta Gates, Archivist & Founder, Most Incredible Studio
Raised in South Jamaica, Queens, with a camera in one hand and a Source magazine in the other, she’s been preserving the stories we live since before she knew it could be a career. She doesn't follow blueprints — she builds them.
She earned a degree in Urban Youth Culture from Hunter College (because she invented the major) and went on to NYU for her Master’s in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. Then? She wrote her own ticket. Gates is the founder of The Gates Preserve, a company devoted to protecting the creative record and making sure the worlds we shape outlast us.
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Her work lives across mediums. She’s led archival research and produced award-winning docs, including Netflix’s Ladies First, Peacock’s Black Pop, The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion, and A Ballerina’s Tale. Currently, she’s producing her first feature, Shaping the Culture—a definitive excavation of hip-hop journalism from Xerox to Twitter.
Syreeta was the first Black woman on LEGO® Masters (U.S. Season 2). Where she didn’t just build with bricks, she built Most Incredible Studio. This creative house crafts cultural compositions and collectible artifacts, transforming memories into experiences and intellectual property (IP) into tangible form.
She also founded Yo Stay Hungry—a live culinary competition where rap meets recipes and food becomes freestyle. Because when the format doesn’t exist, she invents it.
Gates has been featured in and has been recognized by The New York Times, Vogue, Forbes, Black Enterprise, Refinery29, Red Bull, and more. Her work lives on the page in books such as Fresh Fly Fabulous, BLK MKT Vintage, Stand Up!, The Quarter-Life Breakthrough and Creating Innovators.
Whether it’s a kit, a keynote, a documentary, or a dinner, Syreeta is a visionary, archival thinker, and cultural conductor. Her north star is always the same: How do we make memory visible? How do we create what’s missing? And how do we build a future worth remembering?
Presented with the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and SVA Theatre
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The Center's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
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