Maike grew up in a small village in southwestern Germany, where roughly 1,500 people share a single primary school and everyone knows each other by name.

While her friends spent summers at the pool, she began working in hospitality at fourteen, later juggling two jobs and helping at a COVID-19 testing station.

That balance between quiet surroundings and early responsibility shaped her character — grounded, reliable, and unafraid of hard work.

After finishing school, Maike crossed the Atlantic alone to work as a camp counsellor in Indiana and then travelled from Los Angeles along the entire West Coast before continuing to New York. Once she had seen that, going back to her old life and place suddenly felt small.

Back home, late-night TikTok scrolls of flight attendants moving through airports and time zones hit her differently. At some point it stopped being “nice to watch” and turned into a decision: she didn't just want to see the world on a screen; she wanted to move through it herself. She applied on the spot, got hired within weeks and moved to Frankfurt, trading village streets for boarding gates and briefing rooms.

Since then, she has seen more of the world than many do in their whole lives and learned to navigate cities, cultures and people as naturally as others commute to work - all while studying Media and Journalism full-time, but as she is grounded, reliable and never afraid of putting in the work she successfully handled it.

Los Angeles had lived in Maike's imagination long before she ever saw it. During her study abroad semester she finally studied where her heart had always been: in LA.

She split her days between lectures, castings, shoots and meeting photographers, musicians, actors and other creatives. Over those months she found her rhythm in the city, built a network and turned LA from a fantasy into a place where she genuinely belonged. She's a real social butterfly - the kind of person who turns a quick hello into a connection and makes people feel at ease on and off camera.

For brands, that means working with someone who hasn't just posed for pictures, but has actually lived several worlds - village, airports, global cities and Los Angeles - and quietly brings that depth into every campaign.