I turned my creative passion into a lucrative side hustle that earns me up to 40% of my income as a freelancer

• I’ve always worked in dance, but it’s ebbed and flowed as a main job and side gig.
• Instead of taking on “Joe Jobs” and burning out, I’ve focused on creating a lifestyle that suits me.
• My smart career choices have landed me in a place where dance now makes up 30-40% of my income.

My first career was working in dance as a choreographer and dance teacher. Over the years, my work in dance has evolved from being my main gig, to a passion project, to a bona fide side hustle, and has emerged as the one constant in my professional life.

Making my passion my side hustle has allowed me to keep one foot in the art world and supplement my income, while I develop other, more lucrative skills to build a stable, fulfilling, and diverse work life. Here’s how I’ve made the side hustle model work for me with a gig that can shrink and grow as I need it to. 

I always knew I’d have to have a ‘Joe Job’

I grew up dancing. By the time I reached high school, attending a reputable arts school and apprenticing as a dance teacher at my local studio, it was clear that I wanted to make a living in dance. I had few illusions about what this would mean for me financially and made peace with the knowledge that I would likely always need to have what’s sometimes called a “Joe Job,” or another, more stable way to support myself. 

It’s a cliché for a reason: artists moonlighting as servers, bartenders, or the like. I have many wildly talented friends who work side gigs in the service industry and elsewhere. There’s my bestie who’s a brilliant visual artist/server, my pal who runs her own successful contemporary dance company and makes pasta by hand, and my music producer ex who does woodworking, bartending, and odd jobs here and there to pay the bills. 

When I first entered the world of Joe Jobs, I opted to work as a nanny and spend my weekends working retail at an activewear boutique. I did this kind of work for years and I get why many artists choose this model: there can be a sort of healthy separation and distance in earning your income in a different sector than your career.

But working in childcare and retail sapped my energy and contributed little to my work in dance or to my life in general, outside of providing me with some of my funniest anecdotes, horror stories, and dear friends I met while working in the trenches. 

At the same time, after making it work professionally as a choreographer for years and teaching dance to support myself (just barely), I felt burnt out and disillusioned. Between my main dance gigs and other side jobs, I was working more than full-time, running all over the city to teach here, there, and everywhere, and writing grant applications on the weekends. Even when my work was programmed by popular venues and presenters, the fees I received barely covered production costs and never came close to funding the hundreds of rehearsal hours with dancers, lighting designers, and video artists. Never mind paying me a salary — which very rarely happened.  

I eventually turned my ‘main’ gig into my side gig

So in 2016, I made a shift: I changed careers, moving into the nonprofit sector and developing another side of my personality and potential. I always kept one pointed foot in the dance world as a teacher, though. As my career at the nonprofit took off, my teaching ebbed and flowed, fluctuating from one class a week in the early days to upwards of nine or 10 classes a week over the years. In my busiest and most lucrative year, my side hustle moved me into a new tax bracket. I scaled back my teaching the following year in an effort to find the sweet spot and get the best of both worlds: stable income earned doing a job that connected me to a sense of purpose and service, and that aligned with my core values, and creative work in dance that connected me to my deepest sense of self. 

Shortly before the pandemic hit, I’d found the sweet spot: I was advancing in my salaried position as a programs manager at a national nonprofit and was teaching two evenings a week at a dance studio where I had an established group of regular students. I learned to hone in on what was and wasn’t working in my side hustle. Teaching at one studio instead of running all over the city, keeping my weekends free, and setting a realistic hourly rate for myself helped to create the conditions for a side hustle that felt good and supplemented my income. 

The pandemic has shifted my income and work life once again

The pandemic led to a great reckoning for me, as it has for many. I left the city, moved to a small town, bought my first home, and resigned from my nonprofit job to start my own freelance business as a writer and curriculum developer. I’ve since ramped up my side hustle teaching dance, both virtually and in-person. And it’s now my most stable source of income, typically accounting for 30-40% of my total earnings. 

The lessons I learned from my early career in dance, where I worked a Joe Job to support myself, prepared me for my now fully-freelance career as a writer and dance teacher by showing me what didn’t work for me. I now wonder, which one of my jobs is the side hustle? And which one is my main gig? To me, this feels like a healthier, more sustainable model and allows me to have so much more than a Joe Job.