ABOUT - Matthew Blewett

ABOUT MY STORY MINNESOTA

Matt Blewett created My Story Minnesota to bring together his event and portrait photography business. For a decade Matt has been capturing events for organizations big and small. Matt's personal projects were the Minnesota Sports Report and Minnesota Dance News media sites, where he, and some friends interested in the projects, covered high school sports in Minnesota. Matt has been published in numerous publications including the Star Tribune, Billboard Magazine and US Weekly.

Through those projects, Matt started to get requests for more complex content, including custom portraits and the occasional video project. My Story Minnesota is an effort to make it simpler for clients to reach out for custom photo and video services. We specialize in editorial (news and media) event coverage as well as custom portrait (studio or outdoors) services for individuals and organizations looking to share their story and craft their image and narrative through digital and printed work.

Although the project was started by and is managed by Matt, he is always looking for great content creators to partner with and if your project needs a specialist we are happy to connect you with one.

ABOUT DANCERS OF MINNESOTA

In Oct. 2016, having built a following in "traditional" sports like football, basketball, hockey and wrestling, Matt noticed that there was one high school winter sport that was not receiving the media coverage that the traditional companies enjoyed. With that idea in mind, Minnesota Dance News was born as an outlet to cover high school sports.

The day after our first event, a Metro West conference meet at Benilde-St. Margaret's, the traffic shut down the brand new website and every year the traffic gets bigger and we have had to adjust, and with that the cost went up.

Enter Dancers of Minnesota in 2020. The Dancers of Minnesota project's goal is two-fold, to create a platform to highlight individual dancers, augmenting the coverage of Minnesota Dance News and secondly, to help generate some income to keep Minnesota Dance News (and the increased cost for bandwidth and storage) online.

100% of the proceeds from Dancers of Minnesota photo shoots will go directly to Minnesota Dance News to:

Hire photographers to cover high school events - it is the goal of Minnesota Dance News to keep access free for high school dance team coverage.
Cover fixed costs (website, storage and security costs of hosting an online news source).

Supporting...

My Story Minnesota is committed to helping Minnesotans and has several projects that a portion of all proceeds goes to fund.

Minnesota Dance News - keeping coverage of high school dance team is quite costly and My Story Minnesota is committed to doing its part to keep quality photos and stories from Minnesota's high school dance community free and accessible to as many people as possible. 100% of Dancers of Minnesota custom dance portrait proceeds go directly to cover the costs of Minnesota Dance News (including hiring extra people to cover more events).
Business owners in Minneapolis who lost most if not all of their business in June 2020. You can purchase a custom print of the Minneapolis skyline to Lake Street and 100% of proceeds will go to help businesses in that area get back on their feet.
International humanitarian groups who are providing water and medical resources and education to areas that are in need.

ABOUT MATT BLEWETT

Matt grew up in Papua New Guinea, where his parents still live, and has a passion for dance of all kinds. He grew up dancing the native tribal Siiburu dances as a child using bamboo and other "bush" instruments. Since moving to Minnesota, Matt has taught himself photography and web design, building his first media project, The Minnesota Sports Report and working his way up from covering youth and high school sports.

Matt has had a freelance photography contract with the Star Tribune since 2015 and his work can be found weekly in the Sunday Scene + Heard feature found in the Variety section. See the web versions at www.startribune.com/style and look for "Scene + Heard" titled articles.