Creative Work, Real Life: Building a Career Without Losing What Fuels You

• Explore how a non-linear career can become a creative advantage rather than something to overcome.
• Consider why protecting interests, relationships and experiences outside work can strengthen creativity.
• Discover how creating your own opportunities can open routes into industries that may not match your original degree or career plan.
• Reflect on how to pursue an ambitious creative career without allowing your job to become your entire identity.

Hosted by Academy Creative Producer Fiona Byrne, this NACA Creative Conversation explores what it means to build a creative career that is sustainable — professionally and personally.

Rachel will share how creativity remained a constant through very different stages of her life: documenting the everyday on YouTube during recovery, studying Drama & Film, building opportunities outside the traditional route, and joining Twirl as its first hire to help grow a creative platform from the ground up.

At the heart of the conversation is a simple idea: creative work does not exist separately from the life behind it. Rachel will explore the value of staying connected to the people, interests and experiences that fuel you, and why building a full life outside work can be part of building stronger, more authentic creative work.

Rachel Nielsen is Lead Creative Strategist at Twirl, where she helps shape creator-led work and has experienced first-hand what it takes to build a creative platform from the ground up.

Her route into the creative industry was far from conventional. At 19, while recovering from a car accident, Rachel began documenting everyday life on YouTube. She later moved from Indonesia to the UK to study Drama & Film, before realising that the traditional path was not the right fit and beginning to create her own opportunities.

That approach eventually led her to become Twirl’s first hire. Four years on, Rachel continues to work at the intersection of creativity, creators and marketing, while also speaking about creative careers, user-generated content and the importance of maintaining a life beyond work.

Her philosophy is grounded in the belief that creativity is shaped by lived experience: the most authentic creative work comes from people who are actually living. For Rachel, protecting the things that fuel you outside work is not separate from a creative career - it is part of sustaining one.