When Paola Moya first came to DC from Bogota, Colombia with her family as a teenager, they did not come with a specific plan. Fast forward two decades, and today her vision is clear: to continue designing a DC that is open to all.

Moya is one of the District’s top building designers, helping to shape the nation’s capital with a school here, a housing complex there, or a theater over here, not to mention being part of the design team who brought the District’s new soccer stadium, Audi Field, to the middle of it all.

How did a young woman from Colombia who started off working odd jobs in kennels and day cares become owner of Moya Design Partners—whose clients include, city and private partners all helping to shape today’s capital?

“We didn’t come here to fail,” Moya says in an even-keeled voice that seems to roll with the ups and downs that inevitably come with high-stress development in a town like DC, where she says there is always a fire to put out. “There is no other way out but to succeed.”

One way she does it is by facing her fears, she said. The only job she could get when she first came to the U.S. was taking care of dogs in a kennel. Even though she had a phobia of dogs, she gulped and said “sure.”

“It helped me overcome the fear,” Moya says, to the point that she even owned a labrador-golden retriever at one point.

She also delivered pizzas, worked at daycare centers, and usually held two or three jobs at a time to help her parents and siblings make it and go to school. Eventually, she was able to attend Montgomery College at night and started working as an assistant at a design-build firm. She continued working at an architecture firm as she earned her bachelor’s and then master’s degrees in architecture from Catholic University.

After graduating she partnered with architect Michael Marshall to open Marshall Moya Design, a firm that lasted from 2010 to last year. Last September she opened her own firm and officially launched in January of this year, Moya Design Partners, which employs between 15 to 20 people from different parts of the world.

Moya’s clients have included MGM Resorts, D.C. Public Schools, the Howard Theater, the University of the District of Columbia, and the new Entertainment Sport Arena, ESA, which it is the practice facility for the Wizards and the home for the Mystics, coming to Anacostia. In addition, she was part of the team who helped deliver the new Audi Field to D.C. United. Her firm  produced the first Plan Unit Development (PUD) application for the stadium and designed interior portions of it, including the team store.

“I’ve always loved all-things design, architecture, and visual communications,” said Moya, who describes her aesthetics as open, sleek and contemporary, adding that the welcoming and open nature of the new soccer stadium is her favorite feature, highlighted by the way you can see inside the bowl and its shape from the outside. “Before you enter you can see the landscape, the soccer fans and their energy; it’s all part of the process of walking up to it and the building revealing before you.”

She said her new firm is focusing more narrowly on projects that promote women and affordable living. One of her company's next developments is designing a 42-unit apartment building in the District to help women and their families who have lived through domestic violence, Moya said.

Key to Moya’s success has been building relationships, she said, and being creative in solving her clients’ problems.

“You have to listen, take into account their means, and understand what a client really wants or needs, and it takes time to get to that place of understanding,” Moya said. There are always fires, she said, but she loves it because that is life. She also balances work and personal life by being fully cloud-based so she and her team can work from anywhere in the world, including when being away with family or when training for a marathon.

“I used to wonder, is there going to be a week or month when nothing pops?” Moya said. “And the answer is no, and I am fully embracing the journey”

Moya has also been able to integrate herself into deals and creatively find new work. For example, she created a marketing and visual design firm inside her architecture firm to help clients market their projects.

Together with other young contemporaries, she is helping to design the new DC.
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“In our own way we’re shaping what DC is now,” Moya said. “Not in a million years did I imagine how my career has shaped. But it’s part of our survival, as immigrants, to make it. We become very resilient people. It’s part of who we are, and however you measure success, you work double, triple hard to get there.

Stacey Khoury-Diaz, 29, spent an early career in international development in Washington, D.C., before returning to her roots in wine. Born to a Mexican-American family in Sonoma County, she grew up around friends and family cultivating grapes and making wine.

After six years in DC, “I decided I was finished and I wanted to do something different,” she said.

So last September she opened Dio – named for Dionysus, the Greek god of wine – a natural wine bar on H Street. The wine bar follows Khoury-Diaz’s own philosophy of natural is best, and specializes in wine made with organically grown grapes, free of biochemical and herbicides, and with little added or removed in the process of making the wine.

Her philosophy stems from her studies and travels related to poverty, health, and education, as well as watching farm workers in her California community growing up.

“It makes you think about how you can improve things, make things more transparent,” Khoury-Diaz said. “So from a social and environmental perspective, it made a lot of sense.”

The differences between natural wines and traditional ones can be subtle, or vary. Some of the wines can be earthier than traditional wines. And while a cabernet sauvignon might usually be described as bolder, and bigger, a natural cabernet sauvignon might be light and bright, she said.

One of her favorite wines is a pét-nat or Pétillant-naturel, a type of sparkling wine where the grape ferments in the bottle and the bottle is capped off (like beer,) leading to a cloudier wine often with some residual sediment.

“It’s something fun and whimsical intended to be drunk soon,” Khoury-Diaz said.

She’s been doing little drinking lately, expecting her first child who was due this month, but not slowing down since she still tastes and spits to put together the wine list at Dio.

The list includes natural wines from California to Africa and South America, though the most prevalent labels are European. Like the wines, the customers are also international. Natural wine bars are popular all over the world, including Paris, New York, California. For DC, it’s still new, she said, but the city has a lot of adventurous drinkers and eaters, and lots of travelers who seek out natural wines.

Together with her general manager Janine Copeland, Khoury-Diaz likes to promote other women of color in the business, and she highlights the little noticed labor of those who work in the fields. Lining the bar are simple photos of farm workers, a nod to her home and culture.
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“It’s a message to say this is still a part of me, my space,” Khoury-Diaz said. Helping introduce natural wines to the District feels right, she said. And often, people find her, walking into the bar and feeling right at home with the wine they prefer. “You’re the only place that has it.”

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​THREE WINES FOR SUMMER:

Khourey-Diaz offers some natural wine recommendations to enjoy this simmer, or anytime:
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Pink Bubbles - Channing Daughters 2016 Rosato Pétillant Naturel. This is a natural style of sparkling - pet nat for short - from Long Island, New York. It is farmed sustainably with no additives. It's bubbly, bright, and tastes like jolly ranchers without all of the sugar. 
 
Rosé (kind of) - Kelley Fox 2017 Pinot Gris. This is technically an orange wine because white grapes (pinot gris) have been fermented on the skins to give the wine a bit more color and texture. However, Pinot Gris can sometimes have a very pink hue, and this wine drinks just like a dry, refreshing, but still interesting, rosé.

Chilled Red -  Mariam Iosebidze’s 2016 Tavkveri. This is an obscure red grape varietal from the country of Georgia. This wine is woman-made and is both refreshing and complex with a fusion of smokiness, bruised strawberries, and acid. 
 
About Dio Wine Bar:

Address:
904 H Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
(202) 506-3103
 
Opening Hours:
Tues-Fri:          5 p.m.
Sat:                  4 p.m.
Sun:                 3 p.m.
 
Online: diowinebar.com

After a career spanning six decades, dozens of albums, worldwide hits in English and Spanish and performances in front of five U.S. presidents, Grammy winner Vikki Carr can now be found singing in the choir on any given weekend at her church, St. Matthew Catholic Church in San Antonio.

By doing something she loves, using her talents to connect to others and honoring her faith, she is taking care of herself, she said - something she didn’t always do. But today she says practicing self-care is something she does consciously and tries to advocates for with her audiences, especially in the Latino community.

“You have to move, be physical, laugh, be happy,” said Carr, who turns 78 this month. “There’s so much life to live, you have to.”

Carr will be speaking at the UnidosUS annual conference in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, July 7th, during UnitedHealthcare’s “Hay Más Adelante” workshop geared for seniors. Among the program’s offerings is support for caregivers, she said, adding it has lightened the load for her.

“The most important person to take care of is yourself,” said Carr, who is caring for her husband of 25 years. He is dealing with a long term illness.

During most of her career Carr – born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona – was looking out for her public and her shows, she says. She was told to save her voice for performances and asked in so many ways, by so many industry folks, to be quiet, to shut up.

But after finding love with her husband and settling into life in San Antonio, Carr also found deeper connections to her Catholic faith and to God, she said. Secure in her beliefs, she no longer stays quiet.

“Now I reached a point that I have found my voice,” Carr said. “I’m opening my mouth more because I feel things need to be said.”

She still tells families education is critical. She has a scholarship fund that has sent some 300 Latino youth often from migrant families to universities like Harvard, Yale and UCLA to become an astronaut, doctors and judges.

Born in El Paso, she says the separation of families at the border is tragic, but adds everyone needs to work together if anything is going to get fixed: “This country needs us all to work together, not against each other.”

And raised in an era when your father, mother, husband or manager took care of your business, Carr said she’s become savvy in handling her own affairs, and tells other women to also count on themselves first.

But most of all Carr talks about loving and taking care of yourself no matter your age – sleep, eat well, keep moving, count on your faith.

And talk about what matters to you with no apologies. In her case, how her faith has always been there for her – guiding her to make her own decisions that got her hits when no one else believed in her choices, and with her from her performance days in lonely hotel rooms to caring for the love of her life now.
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“My father told me you are an American of Mexican descent. Be the best human being you can be. I’ve tried to be the best that I can,” Carr said. “And if I talked too much about God, well, I’m not sorry.”

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SATURDAY, JULY 7 EVENT DETAILS:

What:
UnitedHealthcare’s “Hay Más Adelante” event where Latino seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries will learn about Medicare and celebrate their culture, supported by the AARP Medicare Supplement Insurance Plans. 

When:
Saturday, July 7
2:00 p.m. and a meet-and-greet scheduled for 3:30 p.m.

Where:
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Room 207B; (Booth at Exhibit Hall D & E,) as part of the UnidosUS Conference
801 Mt Vernon Place NW, Washington, DC 20001

Who:
Vikki Carr, UnitedHealthcare speakers. Supported by the AARP® Medicare Supplement Insurance Plans, insured by UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company

​Cost:
The event is open to the public, and there is no cost to attend. For more information or to confirm attendance, call 1-800-983-6998 or visit http://www.haymasadelante.com.