Creator Stories: Featuring @AriannaGrainey, Arianna Grainey
My name is Arianna Grainey, and I began my creative career as a photographer in college. I am a graduate of Arizona State, and initially started to work part-time at a local newspaper covering for several different suburbs of Phoenix. While in college, I interned with the ASU Team Photographer, which is where it all started. Although this was the beginning of my career, it is not where my love of cameras began.
My dad’s work caused us to travel a lot when I was a kid, allowing me to visit 15 countries by the time I was 12. My mom would constantly take photos of us and the places we were visiting and as I grew older, I took over the job from her. For as long as I can remember, I have had a camera in my hand. I was about five years old when my parents bought me my first camera. It was a Polaroid and the film was 35mm. I used the camera so often that I would run through multiple cartridges a month. A few years later when I was eight, my dad won a digital point-and-shoot camera from a soccer contest, which I so graciously claimed as mine.
It wasn’t until high school that I got a camera that was officially mine, as my mom gave me her film camera, allowing me to take traditional photography. The camera became such a part of my life that all my teachers knew about me and my photography skills. Once my senior year rolled around, all my teachers would let me leave class to go to the lab. Once I graduated from high school, I finally bought my first DSLR camera.
Once I got to ASU, I began to intern with Peter Vander Stoep, the team photographer and my mentor. He taught me everything I know about professional photography, and I really owe my career to him. To this day, I continue to work with him for ASU football, and it is such a pleasure that I get to do what I love with such a great photographer and an even better person. Aside from Peter, Elsa Garrison is another photographer that I truly admire. She was one of the first women to trail-blaze in sports photography and showed me at a younger age that I can have future success in this industry.
My career took off in 2017 when I met a parent looking for a photographer for her daughter’s varsity soccer team. I was fortunate enough to tag along with the team and photograph every game. Other teams started to recognize me and my work, and all of a sudden I had made a name for myself. I am coming up on my 8th season working with the Casteel High School girl’s soccer team, and I am very grateful for every second of it. In my second season with the school, both the girl’s soccer team and the football team won the state championships, and I was there to cover it all! In 2019, I went full freelance mode and started doing a lot of government PR. I recently began working as Phoenix FC’s team photographer, meaning a lot more soccer games in my future.
I’m so glad to be on Gondola because I can finally track all the usage of my photos. I wish this had existed earlier in my career as I know that several of my photos did well on social media accounts, but do not exist anymore. It is also really encouraging and exciting to see who is truly behind some of the coolest content on social media as it establishes a connection between myself and all my creator peers.
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