Fot. Polskie Radio

Monika is a designer and educator with 30 years of international experience. Polish-born and UK based, she's the founder of the Be Creative Again online course. At the heart of her work is a simple belief: that everyone has a creative life worth nurturing — and sometimes just needs a little help finding their way back to it.

Monika Jakubiak forged her creative vision on the London fashion scene of the late 1990s and 2000s, working with designers such as Hussain Chalayan and Clements Ribeiro, and as a technician on the legendary MA Fashion Design course at Central St Martins under legendary Professor Louise Wilson — an experience that gave her an intimate, firsthand window into how extraordinary creative talent is nurtured and taught.

That insight has shaped everything she has done since. Taking what she learned at CSM and carrying it across a vast range of cultures and contexts, she has come to understand that wherever you go, people are looking for essentially the same thing: a genuine creative outlet. A design consultant and developer of artisanal fabrics, she has worked with slow fashion brands and independent start-ups from Austin and New York to Warsaw, contributed to iconic British brand TOAST, and collaborated with the ANOKHI brand and the Anokhi Museum of Block Printing in Jaipur. She is currently a design consultant at the Nila House initiative in Jaipur.

Over the last 20 years, her real passion has been unlocking the creativity in others. She has designed and delivered workshops across 17 countries, funded by institutions including the V&A, Tate Britain, and the European Parliament — reaching everyone from students at GEIDAI University of the Arts in Tokyo to small community groups in rural Poland. She currently mentors Art and Design students at UAL Central St Martins and is a visiting tutor at the Reykjavik School of Visual Arts. Wherever she works, the approach is the same: deep research, genuine curiosity, and helping people find and trust their own creative voice.

"Flexing the curiosity muscle is the key to opening up your creativity.”