The Science of Creativity

CMU alumna Adriana Salame Aspiazu makes the holidays come alive

It could be considered a holiday miracle that Adriana Salame Aspiazu found her footing as a designer of pop-up bars and entertainment spaces.

After all, that’s not the career path of most biology majors.

But for Adriana, a 2013 Mellon College of Science graduate, the change from the scientific method to more artistic pursuits was a natural one.

“To me, art is something that should make you feel,” Adriana says. “It's something that should look beautiful, but it has to elicit feeling. That's the part that you dream up and that you imagine. But making it come to a reality is very protocol-heavy work, which is like my biology lab to a T.”

Adriana’s childhood — first in her native Ecuador and later in suburban Washington, D.C. —  was always filled with music. But science was always there as well, thanks to a couple of relatives.

“When I lived in Ecuador, I had my step uncle,” she says. “He is a field biologist, and he'd been all over the Amazon and he married this German lady who was a marine biologist. They would come back with all these stories and I admired them so much.”

Those tales, along with biology classes in high school, nudged Adriana toward Carnegie Mellon, the alma mater of her two older sisters. And while she enjoyed her time at CMU, she found after graduation that she wasn’t excited about the opportunities available to her.

“I really loved my lab classes, but in terms of where biology students go, which is either med school or research and academia, I found that my heart wasn't into that work,” she says. “I love ‘my heart is in the work’ — I always use that phrase now — and I thought that that was it.”

But all through her undergraduate education, Adriana never set aside her creativity. She continued singing in choruses, something she enjoyed since childhood and she was a member — and eventually president — of Soundbytes, one of CMU’s a cappella groups.

“Being in Soundbytes is really what made me,” she says. “I'd worked so much in blending — that's what really taught me to stand out and to solo. But specifically, all the support that I got from the Soundbytes team, it was amazing. I love them. I owe them a lot.”

Adriana returned to the Washington area after graduation and began working for one of her sisters, who owned several bars in the region. Among her sister’s connections was Greg Boehm, the New York City bar owner who founded the Miracle franchise of pop-up holiday bars.

“My sister said, ‘That idea is genius, and we want to do it next year.’” Adriana says. “So I came back and I helped with the decorations. I didn't super design that one, but I helped a little bit, and I really loved it.”

Her sister also asked her to manage that first Miracle pop-up in Washington, which gave Adriana a firsthand look at what the decorated space meant to customers.

“It just showed me that extension of the magic of Christmas and how people would bring their families, their friends, their loved ones, their office mates, whoever,” she says. “And this huge line formed every night because we went so crazy with the decorations — I mean, we really went over the top with this installation idea.”

That first year was the start of a learning process that Adriana is still refining. She had to keep the fire marshal happy. They couldn’t be so over the top that they would hinder the flow inside the space. And they had to be theft-proof.

“These designs are always pretty canopy heavy, just because I've seen people rip stuff off the walls and take it home with them,” she says. “So I learned that I need to think through the design and blame the design if it allows for you to walk out with a three-foot reindeer.”

That first year led to several more Christmas pop-ups, for her sister’s bars and elsewhere. But the experience also led Adriana to branch out to other holidays and concepts. First came a pop-up in celebration of Washington’s cherry blossom season, when the Japanese cherry trees that circle the city’s Tidal Pool bloom each spring. That design included another nod to the Japanese — a space dedicated to Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. series of video games.

“We did two of the bars, half cherry blossom, half Super Mario,” she says. “And then the Super Mario Bar was on the front page of Reddit. It just exploded.”

That marked something of a turning point for Adriana, as it was the last time she was a regular behind the bar. From that point on, her focus was on the design side. There was a pop-up “Game of Thrones” bar and a tribute to the World Series champion Washington Nationals in 2019.

There was a slump in the business during 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down entertainment spaces everywhere, and Adriana spent much of the year with family in Ecuador, staying healthy and writing songs.

And when the world emerged from the pandemic, there was plenty of work for Adriana, who had branded herself as the Pop-Up Bae. Her work is now sought after around the country and even internationally. And while Christmas pop-ups aren’t her only gigs, they’re still among her favorites.

Music also occupies much of Adriana’s time. She released a Spanish-language single in fall 2024 and is wrapping up a Christmas EP, in Spanish and English, for release this month.

Despite the fact that she’s never really pursued a career in the sciences, her CMU education is still the catalyst for her creativity.

“Everyone is born an artist. Everyone is born a genius,” she says. “But to be empowered in a place like Carnegie Mellon that doesn't just teach you stuff — it teaches you that you can teach yourself how to learn and you can learn anything. I had serious imposter syndrome at first, but I’ve learned and I found something that gets me out of bed every morning. That’s what it did for me.”