Joanne Lee Molinaro, '04, From Lawyer to Tik Tok Star
Can Joanne Lee Molinaro, the Korean Vegan, ever stop overachieving?
When you lay out the facts about Joanne Lee Molinaro, also known as the Korean Vegan, she starts to sound a bit like the meme version of Chuck Norris: Joanne Lee Molinaro is a cookbook author, food blogger and partner at a major law firm; Joanne Lee Molinaro became a TikTok star in her free time; Joanne Lee Molinaro runs long distances for fun.
Now that her social media empire — more than 450,000 followers on Instagram and more than 2.4 million on TikTok — requires more of her time, she concedes that she’s scaled back her running, adjusting her weekly goal from 35 to 45 miles to just over 25. “I’m very goal-oriented,” she says when asked about her intimidating hobby over Zoom. “If you tell me ‘this is your mileage for the week’ and I don’t hit it by even a mile, I start to hate myself.”
I’m a lawyer turned novelist, and I know a lot of artistic lawyers and former lawyers, most of us English majors with some level of risk aversion. Molinaro was an English major at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She went to law school at the University of Chicago, then started working in the Chicago office of an international law firm. Remarkably, she is still there, a partner at the firm, focusing on bankruptcy and commercial litigation. She’s the first successful creative type I’ve ever come across actively working in Big Law. The expectation of constant availability, the tyranny of the billable hour — the lifestyle is not particularly amenable to time-consuming side hustles.
Read more at Los Angeles Time