Design and Direction
My career has mostly been in graphic design and brand identity—for eighteen years at the School of Visual Arts’ in-house design department, eventually as design director, shaping how SVA looked and spoke to the world through recruitment materials, subway posters, websites, and special events. What follows isn’t all traditional design work; some of it is direction, editing, or simply knowing who to bring in and what to ask of them, reflecting collaboration with countless designers, illustrators, photographers, and writers, where I was sometimes the designer, sometimes the art director, sometimes the editor, and sometimes just the person who set the concept in motion and got out of the way. Over time, that also meant leading the team doing the work—building people up, not just projects.
Designed entirely in-house
Awards my work has won
Case StudyVideo Series
SVA Sketchbooks: Students, faculty, and alumni open their sketchbooks and reveal the inner workings of their visual processes.
Subway Series: Faculty artists reflect on the NYC subway posters they created and give some insight into their work.
A Day at SVA: 15 undergraduate students on a typical day, working and playing around SVA's NYC campus.
Alongside print and digital work, my department produced a handful of video projects—developed in-house and shot with professional photographers and videographers. One, made as we returned to campus after COVID lockdown, is a stop-motion piece stitched from still photos and short clips of fifteen students weaving through SVA’s buildings and the streets of New York—a small visual exhale after a long stretch apart. Another flips through student and faculty sketchbooks, filmed simply on a copy stand, letting the drawings speak for themselves. A third follows our subway poster artists into their own studios, talking through process, career, and craft in their own words.
Case Study75 Years of SVA
To mark the School of Visual Arts’ 75th anniversary, I served as editorial and design director on a commemorative book—alongside Gail Anderson and Steven Heller. We conducted dozens of interviews across the SVA community and built the book from 75 unique, individual stories, one for each year of the school’s history. Across nearly all of them, one word kept surfacing: freedom. Creative freedom, professional freedom, the room to explore without someone looking over your shoulder. The book became less a history than an argument for why that freedom matters—the thing that’s kept the school alive for three quarters of a century.
Case StudyCommencement Score
Three excerpts from the score, in the order they were meant to be heard: calm, building, celebratory.
For several years, SVA’s graduation ceremony played a single generic classical CD on repeat—not because anyone liked it, but because licensing popular music for a ceremony broadcast on YouTube meant clearing rights with dozens of artists. I brought in electronic composer Chris Child (who records as Kodomo) to build something better: a score that shifts from calm to celebratory over the course of the ceremony. The score was meant to fill the room and carry the actual main event: students crossing the stage at Radio City Music Hall.
Case StudySavvy
In 2024, SVA’s student government proposed creating a school mascot, and the job of shepherding it through landed on my desk. Since this was meant to be the students’ project, not the institution’s, I set up a democratic process and took on a mentor role rather than a creative one—guiding, not deciding. Three students were selected from an open call, and I spent weeks developing concepts with them, presenting fifteen ideas in total before the full student body voted. The winner, Savvy, was released into the world, and that’s where my involvement ended—it was never mine to champion. Savvy isn’t entirely my aesthetic, if I’m honest, but watching students fully embrace it—official costume, campus merch, a real identity—taught me something I still carry into every class: knowing how far to guide and when to let go.
Graphic design is mostly where I’ve been, not where I’m headed these days—but if something here resonates, or you just want to talk shop, I’d love to hear from you!