Allis Markham

I’m a taxidermist. I have my own studio in downtown Los Angeles, Prey Taxidermy, where I do private commissions and teach taxidermy classes. I also do taxidermy work at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and other institutions when I can.

You know, my thing is when people normally talk about what colleges they went to, I just say that I went to the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center. But in reality, that was a two-week program in Montana I attended by using my vacation days at my old job. I learned most of what I know now as a taxidermist by working at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles under my mentor, Tim Bovard. But before that, I went to a regular, non-taxidermy college—Adelphi University on Long Island, where I studied Anthropology and Theater. I just had to leave due to a lack of funds.

I went to that school only because I knew someone else who went there. I grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. I really wanted to get out of Florida and go to New York, and the only thing I knew about Adelphi was all I needed to know—that it was in New York. It was the only place I applied to. I didn’t get any help—not only with paying for college, but I also didn’t get any help when it came to applying for colleges. I didn’t know the difference between private and public universities. I didn’t know where else I could have gone with my grades and SAT scores. I didn’t have anyone in my life to explain this to me. I went to this expensive private university, took out a student loan that I’m still paying off, and I ran out of money anyway. They didn’t give me any resources to help me stay in school. I didn’t have a family that was willing to do that for me, either—I guess because I had left Florida. When I had to drop out because I couldn’t afford to stay, there I was in New York City, without a college degree, without any money or support, and all I needed to do was survive.

I found whatever jobs I could do. I worked in a hair salon, I bartended, and from there, I was able to become a liquor rep. (I was still underage at the time, but no one asked.) This was my first marketing job. I understood social media in a time when that was very new. I was a very early adopter of Myspace, and I figured out how to use my knowledge of the internet, when older people didn’t know anything about the internet, to get even better jobs in marketing. I moved to Los Angeles, worked in an ad agency, and then I had a small company where, among other things, I would help people promote their YouTube videos. From there, I got a job at a company that had been recently acquired by Disney, and suddenly I was a Disney executive. I was the Director of Social Media Strategy for Disney. I was making a good living, but I wasn’t happy. I never had the opportunity to ask myself what I wanted to do. You know, I did very well in it. Where I ended up would certainly be a great career choice for many people, but for me it was the result of being in a perpetual survival situation. So, when I finally asked myself, What do I want to do?, it turned out to be something very different.

Self-doubt is an emotion I just don’t have—or at least that I don’t admit to having. Maybe that’s a blessing, maybe that’s a curse. I like to say sometimes that I suffer from high self-esteem. But really, it’s other people who suffer from my high self-esteem. If anyone else doubted me, they either didn’t let me know about it, or I didn’t keep them around very long. I don’t have any patience or use for people who doubt me.

For me, the trick is to always keep moving, so I never feel discouraged. Once I decided that I was going to make this giant career change and become a taxidermist, I didn’t pause my brain long enough to consider whether that was actually a good idea. I think I’m smart enough to be capable of doing amazing things, but dumb enough not to realize that I totally could fail. I’m a very self-motivated person. As far as motivation is concerned, when I could identify my passion and convince myself that it’s what I wanted to do, I was already motivated. Just by deciding I wanted to be a taxidermist already meant there was that fire inside me pushing me forward.

I decided to be a taxidermist, but I live in Los Angeles. There are parts of the country where taxidermy is very common, where your town might have several local taxidermists, but Los Angeles isn’t one of those places. So technology and marketing has always had to be a big part of my business—to reach students and customers, to meet other taxidermists, to learn my craft, to buy specimens (no animal I work on died for the art, so I have to build relationships with people all over the world to get the specimens I need). When I came back from taxidermy school and realized I had so much more to learn, I contacted the taxidermist at the Natural History Museum, Tim Bovard, to see if I could volunteer with him. I figured out how to contact him and what his email address was, because I’m pretty good at the internet. It’s strange going from working with technology and social media and then shifting to something popular in the Victorian era. I still use my computer, just not at much, and sometimes I get blood on the keyboard. That rarely happened in my old job.