Damiana Andonova is a healthcare strategy thought partner, published author, and the founder of perinatal health and lifestyle company, J'adore Mon Bébé. Andonova grew up in a sun-soaked village nestled between the Rila and Pirin Mountains of Southwestern Bulgaria, and reunited with her parents in America after having been separated for most of her childhood. She has lived, worked, and found love in Chicago, Scottsdale, Dallas, and Boston. She now lives in Chicago with her Bernese Mountain Dog Berlius, tending gardens, writing, and helping moms and babies everywhere.
HEALTH STRATEGY
Those who have worked with Damiana have called her a "scrappy", "quirky", "multi-hyphenate", and "serial collaborator" spanning the intersection of healthcare, academia, entrepreneurship, and literature. For the first chapter of her professional career, Damiana leaned into healthcare strategy, seeking to understand the pain points of the healthcare industry at varying altitudes. Her first role after college allowed her to return to her hometown in Skokie, Illinois, as an analyst for Sg2, now part of Vizient. In 2017, she moved to Scottsdale to join the strategy team at Phoenix Children's Hospital, supporting enterprise-wide strategic planning, before moving yet again, to work for the Boston-based partner of The Innova Group, and focusing her attention on capital planning. Her consulting career eventually brought her back to Chicago to tune into helping healthcare partners understand and size the impact of their digital health investments. Since then, Damiana has hyper-focused her consulting work to project-based assignments for mission-driven organizations delivering tangible social impact. She is helping organizations advance their marketing means and methods, clean up their budgets, and nurture consensus in data-driven, equitable strategic planning processes.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
In 2017, Damiana's first venture was tutoring | made personal, providing a hybrid, hyper-personalized tutoring and early careers support experience focusing on the whole student. Her clients and tutors spanned four major cities, across disciplines. Damiana continues to support students and early careerists pro-bono, regularly speaks in public schools, and serves as a part-time faculty of health administration.
Now Andonova spends most of her time as the founder of J'adore Mon Bébé. Damiana had originally developed a business plan for J'adore Mon Bébé as a whimsical baby clothing store in the late 2000s as part of a high school business club project. Nearly a decade later, J'adore Mon Bébé has become a digitally-enabled perinatal health company providing a range of perinatal care services to support confident parenting as well as its own branded lines of GOTS-certified organic cotton swaddles, wallpaper, nursery art, greeting cards. J'adore Mon Bébé is also paving the path for doula and birth-worker wellness with the first of its kind clinically integrated network.
Damiana's third entrepreneurial project, N of 1, is a multi-disciplinary effort to honor patient and provider stories, and turn narratives into data that can inform healthcare strategy and planning efforts for a better tomorrow. In its infancy, N of 1 seeks to collect patient stories, and create a platform where providers and patients come together as equals, learning from their experiences and healing together.
ART AND LITERATURE
In an interview with Better magazine very early in her career, Damiana said, "art will always be a part of my life". Damiana spent most of her teenage years interning for a local art center, volunteering at the Art Institute of Chicago, taking art classes, and eventually working as a curatorial assistant at an art gallery. Though difficult to balance with her many interests, art remained a hobby. With no paintbrushes to be found in lecture halls and corporate offices, Damiana turned to pens and keyboards. Her first poetry publication in early 2010s marked the beginning of what would be a decade working on her first poetry collection, published by Honeybees for Peace Press in Fall 2023.
Damiana's forthcoming collection, Baby Universes: On Matrescence and Motherhood brings her professional and literary interests together. Her poetry has previously appeared in the Write City Magazine, Write City Review, and Stanford Medicine’s the Pegasus Review, and others. Her many other writing projects include a Bulgarian memoir-cookbook, a pregnancy and parenting guide, and a range of short stories and novelettes.
I live for fireside chats, after meeting meetings, and discussing new ideas.
