Katya Friedman is a writer and an all around creative bundle. She has eight years of nonprofit experience; primarily focused on content creation, campaign development, partnership management, special events, and Hispanic outreach. She has worked with various animal welfare organizations, as well as with nonprofits supporting at-risk youth, low-income Latino communities, and after school programming.
Katya received her bachelor’s degree in Theatre and Journalism from New York University. She then went on to earn a master’s degree in Risk and Prevention from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Katya was an actress and an improvisational performer for many years so she is not shy. She loves people and animals, not necessarily in that order, and even wrote a one-woman play about how she became an animal activist. She has a blog about her over-enlarged sense of empathy, which she can’t turn off and which often leaves her sobbing in public, but the blog is funny, we promise.
Katya is fluent in Spanish, and loves working within and targeting Hispanic communities. She is a Russian-Cuban-Jew so she’s basically a mutt. This explains why she spends most of her animal shelter volunteering hours with big brown dogs whose breeds can’t quite be figured out. They’re her favorite. So are senior pets.
Katya is obsessed with her family, coffee, and books. She is currently writing her first novel and looks forward to many more. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, their lovely rescue dogs, and a rotating (and endlessly entertaining) cast of foster pets.
Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
– Steven Pressfield