I Quit Teaching to Grow My Business and Tripled Income to $200K

Key Takeaways

- Bigeleisen founded her Brooklyn-based functional design practice in 2020.

- She taught full time in New York City public schools to fund her practice and business.

- As of September 2025, she left teaching to build her studio — and triple her income.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Hannah Bigeleisen, a New York City-based sculptural furniture and lighting designer. Bigeleisen founded her Brooklyn-based design practice in 2020 after debuting her first lighting collection at Brooklyn Designs. She has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and taught high school full time before leaving teaching in September 2025 to focus on her studio business — and triple her income. She averages $10,000 to $15,000 a month. Her involvement with 3pts, a creative business consultancy and co-op founded by Kim Robinson Jr. to help independent artists and makers build sustainable practices, helped her learn the business fundamentals. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Image Credit: Wrenne Evans. Hannah Bigeleisen.

Pursuing art and teaching in New York City

After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art, where I studied sculpture and drawing with an emphasis on printmaking, I moved to New York City in 2010. I began working as an artist assistant. I worked for Katrin Sigurdardóttir to help fabricate her piece for the Venice Biennale, and Orly Genger to help fabricate her piece in Madison Square Park. That was really inspiring to me as a young woman who was new to the city. I was like, Okay. I can see them doing this. This is an attainable thing for me.

At that point, I also started to teach. I wanted a job that was a little bit more sustainable and would allow me to afford a studio space in the city as I prepared for my graduate school portfolio. So I started teaching at an arts preschool, which was a really low stakes but exciting way for me to dip my toe into the field of education because these little kids were so free with their movements and their approach to making and mark-making.

Teaching as an opportunity for impact

Then I went to RISD in 2014. I got my MFA in printmaking, and I also taught there. I had a series of really challenging experiences that also really pushed me to think, Okay. Teaching is something that I want to make an impact in, because I had professors there that I didn’t necessarily align with. I thought, We need educators who have a more diversified background and who have student goals in mind instead of their own agendas.

So when I graduated, I applied to the New York City Teaching Fellows Program, which is a subsidized program to get a higher education degree while teaching full time in public schools. It was also that first year that in 2016 that my husband was moving away from a partnership in his previous business to a solo venture in his studio practice. I knew that we needed some type of stability, so I decided to invest my time and effort into teaching.

Image Credit: Daniel Cochran

Shifting from sculptural to functional work

I taught history and English in the public schools for three years full-time. As an artist, it felt important to be teaching students history. And it was tremendously fulfilling for me. It was a lot of work: teaching full-time, developing new curricula, being in graduate school full-time and continuing my studio practice. Teaching was a way for me to engage in the things that I was interested in and also support my studio practice at the same time. That last year of teaching full time was also when I shifted from just sculptural work to more functional work.

It was an organic evolution of the pieces that I had been making. My husband is a designer, and we’ve known each other since we were 17. We went to art school together. We’ve had a studio practice together, and he was always really encouraging me, like, This piece could be a shelf, or, You should make this into a pattern. I was always really resistant to it because I felt like functionality compromised what I was looking at. In reality, functionality just adds to it. But it was a journey I had to go on myself. Ultimately, I had conversations with curators about incorporating light in a more direct way, and that led me to start working on illuminated sculptures.

Designing a lamp and making sales

So I set about designing my first lamp, which is the Ellsworth Lamp. It’s very heavily inspired by the painter Ellsworth Kelly and also my material studies in aggregate and cement. I applied very last minute for a show during Design Week in 2019 at a fair that some of my friends had done before called Brooklyn Designs, which I don’t think exists anymore.

Image Credit: Daniel Cochran

It was a very low entry-level type of show, and I felt confident being able to do it even though I only had about two weeks to prepare. I got into the show, and it was my first time really operating in the world of design. Then I got