How to Turn Your Art Into a Thriving Business: Lessons from 20 Years as a Creative Entrepreneur
In 2025, Janna partnered with one of her former employees, Becky Goldberg Petty (founder of BGP Learning), to build her own online course called The Art of Business & The Business of Art to teach other business owners and creatives how to successfully monetize their art. The self-paced masterclass in creative entrepreneurship includes over 2 hours of video content and 50+ page printable workbook on how to start and run a business, and how to build a brand. The course is structured into three main sections, The Art, The Business and Putting it All Together, and each section is broken down into short, easy to understand lessons to guide participants every step of the way.
Janna has decades of experience in small business for artists, beginning with the creation of her own college major in Integrative Studies, called Entrepreneurial Creative Business Arts, where she fused entrepreneurial business courses with creative art courses. She also integrated a section on social work to learn more about helping people with art. Upon graduation in 2004, Janna had a business plan, a website and a print catalog. She began selling her handmade products and working on developing her business plan further in the years that followed and in 2013, officially launched Papercraft Miracles. After several years of working in management in the service and creative art fields, Janna took the business full time in 2016 and never looked back. She took what she learned in college, combined with her years of managing other people’s businesses plus several years leading her own team of artists at Papercraft Miracles and rolled it all into this intensive and thought provoking course. The course will teach participants everything they need to start an art business and grow it into something that is sustainable for their lives.
Her course was launched alongside a speaker series of the same name that featured creatives from a variety of fields and mediums. This speaker series gave other creatives the opportunity to speak about their own creative experiences as business owners and to get paid to do so. Janna loves to share her knowledge with other artists and creatives and wanted to find a way to help other artists to share their own experiences without the typical “do it for exposure” routine that every artist knows well.
All of this work culminated in a launch party in April of 2025, featuring the first speakers in the series as well as a fundraiser for Janna’s charity fund, The Mama Birdie Childcare Fund, that she created to provide childcare at professional development events. Lack of access to childcare is a serious burden for many mothers and keeps them from being able to attend networking and professional development events where they can learn to be better leaders in the community. Janna’s fund seeks to solve that problem. She did successfully provide free childcare to any attendees who wanted to bring their children with them to the launch party event and also raised $1500 to begin the research process of implementing this kind of service across the WNY area and beyond.
She is in the process of putting together the line up for the The Art of Business & The Business of Art Speaker Series for 2027 featuring other successful local artists in the throughout the year. Stay tuned for the schedule!
In the meantime, check out her show, Reach the Stars Podcast, for tons of great interviews with cool people who do cool things around the world or read the full story of how Papercraft Miracles came to be here.
