Rico Worl

Owner,

Trickster Company

Hometown/Current City: Juneau

Education: Bachelors of Science in anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Community Work: Promoting arts engagement at a local level; mentoring emerging indigenous artists; promoting cross-cultural knowledge via art and representation.

Family: I am Tlingit and Athabascan from the Worl family of Southeast Alaska and the Demientieff family from the Interior.

What is your favorite place in Alaska and why?

My favorite place in Alaska is Juneau. We have a very strong arts community, easy access to some beautiful hikes and beautiful land to subsist off of.

Name the person you respect and why

There are so many people in my life who have earned great respect, from my mother and grandmother’s hustle to my siblings to the artists in my community who I see working so hard to get to the next level. Also, Virgil Abloh.

What is your favorite pastime or hobby away from work?

Learning new skills and video games!

What was your first job?

I did landscape maintenance work for some corporate property in Anchorage.

What has been your most rewarding community service?

I learned a lot volunteering as a board member of the Juneau Arts & Humanities Council. Got to see a lot of artwork being done in Juneau and about a lot of the organizations promoting those various arts.

In your professional life, what has been a project or achievement you have found to be the most fulfilling?

Building a brand has been very fulfilling. I enjoyed taking a project from raw sketches and big visions and building it. One step at a time, one product at a time, and seeing it grow its own energy as the brand engaged people around it. And when

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that brand can develop a new product that people didn’t expect, I love that feeling of delight in people as they enjoy Indigenous art in ways they hadn’t any time before.

Based on your own experiences, what advice would you give on maintaining a good work-life balance?

Play is incredibly valuable. Play empowers creativity to emerge in all of one’s work. It’s an active version of rest. It encourages bravery to imagine and try new things and envision ideal futures. It helps one not take themselves too seriously. It helps you approach situations with a multitude of “sketches” on your belt to help make better decisions.