She published at fourteen, incorporated in 2024, and has not stopped starting things since. But the number one thing, above all of it: talking to people, supporting people, helping people. The rest is how she does it.
Dakotah Jennifer is a New York City-based entrepreneur, published author, and creative executive. She is the Founder and CEO of DakJen Creative LLC, a certified women- and minority-owned brand strategy and marketing studio headquartered in Maryland with offices in New York and Baltimore, serving founders, executives, and affordable housing developers. She is also Co-Founder and CEO of BaDjR Tech, a product studio that builds software for nonprofit, civic, and small-business clients; founder of Design Domain, a furniture procurement and interior design practice; and founder of DakJen Tie Dye, a registered-trademark apparel line she started in 2020.
She has worked inside affordable housing development since 2020. As Chief Creative Officer at Northern Real Estate Urban Ventures and Managing Director of Project Community Capital®, she owns brand, communications, and creative direction across the firm and its development projects. Her lease-up campaigns reach income-qualified residents by design: at 9410 Hough in Cleveland, a 116-unit development went from partly leased to fully leased in under four months, with more than 400 inquiries and 150 applications in the first 48 hours and a 36.2% qualification rate, thirteen points above the industry average. Her five-year brand engagement for a real estate executive grew a LinkedIn network 237% with a 28-fold increase in engagement.
Before founding the studio, she managed online community for Supermajority’s three-million-member platform, ran social strategy for Black Youth Project, and wrote and edited at BUST Magazine. She is the author of two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press), and the collection System; at nineteen she was the youngest poet Bloof Books had ever published. Her play Masquerade was produced at Washington University’s Edison Theatre in 2020. Her essays and poems have appeared in PopSugar, BUST, The Texas Review, Across the Margin, HerStry, The Pinch Journal, Protean Magazine, and others. She has been quoted twice in Fortune, appeared twice on BBC Global News, and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Juniper Summer Institute, and Writing Workshops Paris.
She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and a BA in English Literature, magna cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a William H. Danforth Scholar, the university’s highest merit and service honor. She sits on the board of WFL Collective and teaches founders through DJC Studio, her fifteen-course small-business curriculum. She also runs EliteWise Escapes, booking luxury travel on points for clients at a fraction of retail.