Today we’d like to introduce you to Page Morahan.
Hi Page, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’ve had a creative bent for decades, but for most of my career it lived alongside — rather than instead of — a full-time career in academic health centers, including years at the leadership level. I made calendars as gifts for family and friends for more than 30 years, and from 2001 until the pandemic I was a founding member and leader of a local nonprofit art cooperative, Orchard Artworks.
For the past 25 of my 50+ years in academia, I’ve partnered with FAIMER (the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research), a global nonprofit dedicated to improving healthcare by supporting the education of physicians and other health professionals worldwide. That work took me to countries across five continents, and I never traveled without a camera — I was always the person stopping the group to look closely at a flower, a sky, an animal’s expression.
During the pandemic, I decided to bring those two threads of my life together deliberately. I turned my photography into an actual art practice and small business, Page’s Pages Around the World, so that the images I’ve collected on my travels could do double duty: bring people joy, and channel a portion of every sale back to FAIMER’s mission. The work has since earned an Honorable Mention in the international Julia Margaret Cameron Award for women photographers and Signature Member status with the National Association of Women Artists, and my greeting cards are now carried in the gift shop at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts — lovely, unexpected affirmations that this “second act” is real artistic work, not just a retirement hobby.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t been a smooth road. Reinventing myself from someone who was a recognized leader in her field to a sole proprietor artist building an audience and reputation from ground zero has been a major adjustment. Some of it draws on skills I already had: decades of competing for research grants and submitting papers to peer review turned out to be surprisingly good training for entering art competitions and standing up to jurying. And just as building a community of academic colleagues sustained me professionally, building a community of fellow artists has been just as essential now, for honest feedback and mutual support.
Beyond that, there’s been an entirely new education in marketing a mostly online art business — website, sales platform, social media, and everything in between. It’s felt like starting another PhD program, and I’m still very much a new postdoc in this arena, which is such a different experience from being an established academic. The challenge is compounded by having a large share of my potential audience be international, which means people are often weighing U.S.-based international shipping costs against the price of the piece itself. I’m developing downloadable PDF versions of some of my art specifically to solve this — I’m hopeful it will make the work accessible to far more people, wherever they live.
There’s also a question I keep circling back to: how much to lead with the real reason I started this business in the first place — supporting FAIMER’s mission — versus letting people discover the work on its own terms first.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I spent 50+ years in academia, as a researcher, administrator, and international leadership educator, and photography was always my quiet second life — the way I processed and celebrated the extraordinary places that work took me.
During the pandemic I turned that lifelong practice into Page’s Pages Around the World, a small art business built entirely around original nature and travel photographs I’ve taken on six continents. Often, a piece pairs the image with an inspirational quote, often presented in multiple languages — a choice that grew directly out of my FAIMER work, when I realized that Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic are spoken by as many or more people worldwide as Spanish or French, the languages Western audiences usually default to. My work is offered as fine art prints, greeting cards, calendars, and metal pieces, and every purchase supports FAIMER, the global nonprofit I’ve partnered with for 25 years, whose mission is to advance healthcare education worldwide.
How do you think about happiness?
Slowing down and truly looking is what makes me happy. My personal motto is: “Slow down, look closely, and find joy in the extraordinary beauty that surrounds us — everywhere across the globe.” I’m in Seventh Heaven when I can stay beside a flower bed for an hour, working out the exact angle that reveals a bloom’s hidden architecture, or catching the one fleeting minute when a sunrise turns a whole sky electric.
And I’m happiest knowing that a photograph I took purely because it moved me is, in some small way, helping fund the education of a health care worker somewhere in the world. That combination of creative joy and tangible impact is really the engine behind everything I do.
Pricing:
- Greeting cards & small gift items: starting at $8
- Calendars: $15 for desk and pdf version of wall calendar
- Fine art prints: $35 for 8×8 – $300 for 40×40
- Metal/Canvas prints: $100/$150 for 8×8 – $1400/$900 for 40×40
- Custom commissions available — pricing on request
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.pagespagesgallery.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pages_aroundtheworld/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/psmorahan#
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/page-morahan-16a0601/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaYjryY8qtHG6tP_2HL3UTA
- Other: https://www.pagespagesgallery.com/linktree
