What Lies Beneath.... Donna Dia

What Lies Beneath is our monthly interview series exploring the inner stories behind outer expression. Through conversations rooted in ritual, heritage, and perspective, we uncover the layers that shape how our guests move through the world.

For more than 15 years, Donna Dia has worked behind the scenes of some of the world’s most influential cultural moments, shaping experiences with precision and taste, and intent. A high spec events specialist and expert producer, her career spans fashion, art, and global culture, collaborating with institutions and brands that define elevated modernity.

Yet it is through founding The Beauty Beat that Donna’s work becomes deeply personal. Created as a celebration of Black women and their relationship to beauty, culture, and care, The Beauty Beat reflects a philosophy she has long embodied: that true luxury lies in thoughtfulness, representation, and feeling seen. In this conversation, Donna reflects on identity, authorship, and the power of creating spaces both physical and cultural; where beauty moves beyond spectacle and into meaning.

Here's What Lies Beneath Donna.

Life Today

As of today, I feel quite at peace. I feel like I’m where I’m meant to be. I feel incredibly blessed in my personal life with my family and friends. Professionally, I certainly feel that I am on a journey that has its share of highs, lows, and everything in between. However, overall, in terms of how I feel about myself and my life today, I’d say the overarching word that springs to mind is content.

Lessons In Career

Working for as many years as I have in events, and with the types of clients and brands I’ve had the pleasure of working with, has definitely taught me that taste is completely individual. You can be working with someone, or be friends with someone, and have so much in common and yet what feels like luxury to you can be completely different from what feels luxurious to them, and vice versa.

Spending over 20 years in luxury events has shown me that taste and luxury, or what is deemed luxurious, can vary enormously. And I’ve learned that this is absolutely OK. 

I don’t think my career failed to teach me anything. Instead, it taught me to be accepting of other people’s visions, which has been particularly valuable. My work and collaborations have shown me that you can’t please everyone, because not everybody shares the same tastes or ideas. That lesson helped me understand and accept that it’s simply not possible to please everyone, because we are all very different.

To Step In A New Direction 

I genuinely can’t claim there was one single moment, feeling, or realisation that led me to leave my full-time role and choose something different. It was an accumulation of moments, realisations, and years of personal growth coming together. There were moments throughout my career when I would pause and imagine what is now The Beauty Beat, but those moments were fleeting and the concept was far from fully formed. While on maternity leave, I allowed myself to imagine for longer. That daydream turned into a few notes, then conversations with those close to me, more notes, and eventually a kitchen-table strategy.

After that, it felt like now or never. I think it was an accumulation of realisations over a 10- or even 15-year timeframe that formed the idea of The Beauty Beat, and possibly the personal changes I experienced when becoming a parent that made me brave enough to take the plunge.

Fear Of Failure

I do feel that launching The Beauty Beat was a very personal act. It was professional of course, in terms of my career and my ambitions, but it was also very personal. And I think that the biggest obstacle I had to overcome in order to create The Beauty Beat was my fear of failure. And not just my fear of failure, but the fear of public failure. So even before launching The Beauty Beat, registering the company, sharing the idea with family & friends, I had to become extremely comfortable with the idea that despite my ambitions, hopes and dreams, The Beauty Beat may not land, it may not be successful. I may not raise the money. I may go out publicly and say I'm launching this and then not be able to for various reasons. And so I think that the fear of failure and accepting the possibility of failure was definitely the realisation I had to both accept and become comfortable with in order to then launch The Beauty Beat.

Essential Beauty

I am a marketer's dream and so I can’t deny that I love all things beauty and wellness, and so an extraordinary amount of products and treatments feel “necessary” to me! But jokes aside, what feels essential to me, is really understanding what suits me, what will allow me to save time, which foundation will be most effective for an 18 hour day and which moisturiser is going to truly replenish my skin after said 18 hour day. Understanding what I absolutely need, what is most effective for me and what brings me the most joy in terms of beauty and the products I use, these are the things that feel essential to me.

The Ingredients To Ambition

I have always been incredibly ambitious. And I've never felt ashamed of that ambition. From very early I always wanted to do the best I could and achieve the goals I had decided upon. I’m the type of person that once I put my mind to something, I’ll do everything within my power to achieve the goal. So I've always been very ambitious, and I think that I'm still incredibly ambitious today, I don't think that my level of ambition has in any way subsided. But I do admit that my relationship with ambition has probably changed in this chapter of my life. I’m certainly more patient with ambition. As in 20 years ago, I'd set my mind to something, and I would want that goal or objective to be achieved yesterday. And I would rarely rest or stop until I had succeeded or felt satisfied I had done everything humanely possible. Whereas today, I understand that there are various ingredients that allow you to achieve your ambitions, and sometimes those ingredients include time and patience. Today I understand that sometimes stepping back and not necessarily bulldozing your way to the goal can also be necessary, and sometimes the better way. So I would say that whilst my ambition hasn’t decreased, today I am more patient.

Paying No Mind Whilst Being Mindful

I genuinely don’t really focus on misunderstandings and underrepresentations, because we all know they exist and we all know what they are. But I feel that my ambition, my mission, is to create beauty spaces and experiences that celebrate Black Womanhood. Creating experiences that centre and celebrate Black Womanhood is where my focus lies. I could expend energy trying to figure out and understand why misunderstandings and/or underrepresentations are still occurring, or I can focus on Black Women. Focus of delivering the best events and experiences I can, events and experiences that are steeped in celebration, in appreciation and in joy. That really is why The Beauty Beat was born.

A Legacy 

If I'm blessed with The Beauty Beat being remembered or thought of, I will always hope that The Beauty Beat is seen as an event and brand that had some impact on how Black Women, Women of Colour, Black Beauty are presented, celebrated and showcased in the UK. Perhaps that The Beauty Beat came along and evolved the way Black Beauty was presented in the UK.