About the episode
This episode is a biographical interview: a long-form conversation built around one person's life and choices, using their individual story to open up a bigger theme rather than leaning on outside commentary. This one sits inside our larger thread on women in the workforce, and centers on Nora, known as CatLadyHi: a DJ and music producer, a licensed yoga instructor, and a graduating senior in Parsons' Integrated Design BFA program. Originally from Dallas, she now works and performs across New York City, holding down nightlife, wellness, and design all at once.
Nora's approach across all three has been to build community as she goes rather than simply push through. In the DJ scene, still one of the harder rooms for women and non-men to be taken seriously in, she organized a Parsons studio event bringing together non-men DJs to perform collaboratively in a space built around safety and support rather than competition. As a CorePower Yoga instructor, that same instinct shows up as presence and care for a room full of strangers; as a design student, it shows up as a systems-level interest in why spaces exclude people in the first place, and how to build ones that don't.
We talk with her about how these three practices, on paper unrelated, actually reinforce each other, and how her upbringing and the mentors along the way shaped the way she moves through all of them.