Maya Shea Penn is a 13 year old entrepreneur, philanthropist, designer, artist, animator (she makes animated short films), illustrator, and writer. She is the CEO of Maya's Ideas, a company she started in 2008 when she was just 8 years old. Maya creates handmade artisan crafted one-of-a-kind eco-friendly accessories and clothing. She have been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Ebony, The Steve Harvey Show, Young Entrepreneur, Redbook, FOX 5 Atlanta, Black Enterprise, Etsy,The NRDC, The Michael Baisden Show, CBS Better Mornings Atlanta, and many other publications.
Her designs are sold all over the world and she has customers in Denmark, Italy, Australia and more. Maya loves to use her creativity to give back to the community, and the environment and it's creatures. 10-20% of her profits go to causes that she is passionate about like: Hosea Feed The Hungry, Atlanta Community Food Bank, The Ian Somerhalder Foundation ( She's a member of their kids division and she write articles and add content/videos to their website.). She also writes a column called Ask The Expert as a contributing writer for Livethrive.org Maya was honored as an entrepreneur at the 2012 SCLC Women's 33rd Annual Drum Major for Justice Awards in the Youth Category. She was honored along with actor and Humanitarian Sean Penn, Actor Samuel L. Jackson and his wife Latanya Richardson, CNN News Anchor Don Lemon, Rev. Al Sharpton, Justice Robert Benham and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson. Maya was a panelist/speaker at the economic empowerment summit at Agnes Scott College that was being presented by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights for teen age girls. She also has a non-profit organization called Maya's Ideas 4 The Planet. She spoke at TEDx Youth November 19th.
Maya loves coding, cartoons, animation, animals, doodling, and dilly-dallying. When she was about 4 years old, her dad showed her how to take apart a computer and put it back together again and that really started her love for technology. She built her first website all on her own in HTML and she is currently learning Python and JavaScript. She has also been drawing since she could hold a crayon and has been making flip books since she was 3 years old. Animation has always been her first love.
Maya's website is: mayasideas.com
Check out the video below to watch one of her animations.
