CLIENT: The New Museum of Contemporary Art

SUMMARY:
A brand-level repositioning that transformed the New Museum’s social channels from a bulletin board into a co-created digital experience. Reframed positioning, refined personas, and designed a behavioral rubric that raised engagement 5x and reconnected the Museum to its audience during closure.

CONTRIBUTION:
Developed the foundational narrative scaffold, then merged and elevated agency concepts (Droga5, Morning.fyi) through subject expertise. Directed cross-team integration, secured leadership buy-in, and led Creative Direction of content ecosystem.

CONTEXT:
In early 2025, the New Museum was closed for expansion, but at risk of cultural invisibility. Social media became its only public-facing channel, yet engagement had fallen to ~1%. Across the industry, social is largely treated like a bulletin board: reactive, promotional, and disconnected from brand strategy. With a once-in-a-generation reopening approaching, we needed more than better posts, we needed a new posture.

THE IDEA:
As we prepped for the reopening, a brand agency posed the question: “What does ‘new’ mean in society?” A fair question, but one rooted in symbols. And meaning shifts with context. So I reframed it: “How does ‘new’ behave?”
This shift from meaning to behavior, moved us from abstraction to action. With exhibitions on pause, social had become our primary stage. It wasn’t just what we said, it was how we showed up. Not what we represented, but how we acted in public.
Drawing from our audience (artists, thinkers, organizers, digital-native participants), I developed a behavioral rubric to guide our strategy:
• Provocative, to shake loose assumptions and move people forward.
• Playful, to blur boundaries and create space for the unexpected.
• Participatory, to invite people not just to watch, but to shape the moment.
These weren’t abstract values. They mapped to real user behaviors and desires, and served as filters for content tone, pacing, structure, and timing.

THE EXECUTION:
To make the digital space feel less managed and more alive, we framed the strategy under a new banner: “Rewilding the Web.” It was a call to treat social not as a static channel, but a living system. Not a curated feed, but a place where people could see themselves reflected—sometimes raw, always real.
One post featured Bruce Nauman in clown costume (1987), shouting “No, no, no...” in a looping tantrum. Captioned only “Mood,” it became a vessel for emotional projection, surfacing unexpected resonance between legacy performance art and meme logic, even drawing parallels to TikTok’s Monday Tantrum Guy... breaking engagement records.
Another showed Judy Chicago walking nude toward the camera holding red flares, captioned: “How your email finds us.” It honored the chaos masked by institutional professionalism, and slipped past platform nudity filters due to her painted body. The post became a quiet act of platform subversion: rewilding not just culture, but infrastructure... again, breaking engagement records in the process.
The audience got it. Not because we explained it, but because they recognized themselves in it... they claimed it as their own.

Visual Delights:

Stacks / Quotables:

Community Reflected:

OUTCOMES:
• Engagement rose from ~1% to 5.2% (industry benchmark: 3%).
• Audience comments included:
“This account is unhinged and I love it”
“This response delighted me so much I screenshotted it”
• Posts were saved, shared, and quoted outside the platform, indicating cultural salience, not just impressions.
• Internal teams adopted the rubric to guide reopening content, aligning voice across departments.
• Repositioned the Museum as a responsive, audience-centered institution, laying narrative groundwork for the reopening campaign.

TAKEAWAYS:
We didn’t just boost engagement. We turned a dormant feed into a living space, something people shaped, shared, and felt part of. By treating social like a system for co-authorship, not announcements, we invited the public back in, long before the doors reopened.

CLIENT:
Project Healing Waters

SUMMARY:
A dual-track narrative system that built rapport with veterans and gained donor buy-in, resulting in a ~61% YoY revenue increase from grants and donors.

CONTRIBUTION: Led strategic reframing, developed dual-audience content system, and designed campaign pacing around emotional resonance and advocacy-building.

CONTEXT:
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, traditional talk therapy fails a significant portion of veterans with PTSD, where disclosure itself becomes a barrier. Project Healing Waters offers experiential therapy through fly fishing, but after a 60% drop in revenue from 2019–2021, they needed a new way to articulate their value to both donors and veterans.

THE IDEA:
We reframed the therapeutic entry point: After multiple interviews with participants—listening for root causes and throughlines, we learned that healing doesn’t start with talking. It starts with wanting to be here. And that matters. This insight, grounded in empathy and simplicity, became the anchor for the campaign: “Healing Matters” It served both as a message and a mirror: reminding participants of their right to presence, and reminding donors that their role was to protect that fragile bridge.

THE STRATEGY:
The campaign avoided traditional segmentation and instead created a compressed narrative cadence:
• Multiple testimonial videos, each with the same tagline but a different emotional entry point (isolation, presence, meaning)
• Deployed serially to overlapping leads via email, functioning as real-time emotional A/B testing
• Warmed leads gradually by pacing trust, not urgency
• Avoided social due to participant sensitivity; targeted B2B channels via email to C-suite execs in military, outdoors, wellness, and mental health sectors
• Each piece of content was scored against emotional resonance, not just metrics. If it didn’t make someone feel seen or invited, it didn’t ship.
• I directed and edited editorial video series using participant interviews (audio-first for trust)
• Built lead pools and segmented deployment strategy to maximize engagement and signal tracking
• Constructed narrative ladder across multiple touchpoints: from emotional resonance → belief → action → advocacy

OUTCOMES:
•Contributed to a 61% increase in revenue from grants and donors during year of active deployment.
• Over 30% of new donors became repeat contributors, warming additional leads and reducing acquisition pressure.
• Sparked advocacy behaviors among donors, expanding reach organically without additional media spend.
• Built a retention-focused content strategy post-campaign, enabling internal teams to maintain emotional rhythm year-round.

FRAMING THOUGHT:
You don’t scale trust. You pace it.
And when trust compounds, it doesn’t just convert—it advocates.

CLIENT: SuperRare Labs

SUMMARY:
A brand and ecosystem reframing that challenged crypto-native assumptions, clarifying platform identity, expanding creator inclusion, and re-centering meaning during a speculative market spike... resulting in a product launch that generated ~$7M in subscriptions QoQ.

CONTRIBUTION: Proposed institutional narrative reframe and semantic strategy. Elements were reflected in RarePass, launched during my tenure.

CONTEXT:
In 2021, SuperRare was at the peak of the NFT boom. Market momentum was strong, but language was collapsing. “NFT” became synonymous with speculation. “Crypto art” flattened into glitch aesthetics. Internally, growth was up, but so was market confusion.

KEY OBSERVATIONS:
• NFTs were seen as collectibles, not minting protocols.
• Crypto art was seen as any artwork minted, not a conceptual condition.
• Meaning was being displaced by hype.

THE IDEA:
In a boom, expansion looks like growth. But in nascent industries, it can also mean confusion.
The insight: if NFTs were only seen as commodities, they’d never function as infrastructure. If crypto art meant “sci-fi glitch aesthetics,” it would never absorb the broader art world.
We needed a semantic reframe:
• NFTs aren’t art—they’re registration tools.
• Crypto art isn’t any artwork minted—it’s a conceptual condition, like Pop Art.
This wasn’t a pivot. It was a deep semantic repair. I proposed aligning the language of the platform with its latent promise of treating minting as creative authorship, and disentangling volatile market speculation from cultural value.

THE EXECUTION:
Working across brand, marketing, and ecosystem design, we initiated a strategic disentangling of key terms, and introduced formats that could embody a broader vision.
Semantic Framework:
• NFTs as validation layer, not art style.
• Redefined “crypto art” à la Pop Art: work about crypto, not just on crypto platforms.
• Advocated for art-historical contextualization as a counterweight to market-driven volatility.
Ecosystem Strategy:
• Pitched creator onboarding beyond design-native artists: dancers, painters, conceptual artists.
• Proposed Rare Pass: a CSA-inspired subscription model for new collectors, rooted rooted intrust, bundling, and curation over hype

OUTCOMES:
RarePass Genesis launched with $7M in primary sales and became a widely adopted format across the Web3 ecosystem, proof of appetite for trust-based formats. Semantic reframes gained traction as the market contracted, validating insights. Internal discussions evolved to embrace broader creator genres and valuation grounded on art-historical terms, which helped to stabilize market volatility.

FRAMING THOUGHT:
“Hype builds markets. But only meaning builds systems that last.”

CLIENT: Nike

SUMMARY:
A narrative pivot that protects Nike’s ccultural relevance in a pluralistic world by reframing performance through identity, not pressure.

CONTRIBUTION: Independent speculative work. Strategic insight, brand narrative reframe, and audience segmentation based on cultural trend analysis.

CONTEXT: Nike’s “Just Do It” line is globally iconic, but as culture shifts, so does how people relate to ambition, discipline, and performance. For younger consumers navigating burnout, mental health, and identity fluidity, high-performance messaging can feel distant or incomplete. Meanwhile, emerging brands like On are growing by connecting movement to emotion and self-expression, not pressure or dominance. Nike’s cultural lead isn’t threatened, but it is being challenged to evolve.

THE IDEA:
Just Do You
• A companion line—not a rebrand—that extends the legacy.
• It reframes the action. Less force of will, more agency of self.
• It creates space for Nike to move fluently between:
High-performance hero content (Just Do It).
Identity-led or mental-health-aligned stories (Just Do You).
• Emerging creators who live power differently, but still want in.

WHY IT MATTERS:
This isn’t just tone. It’s architecture. It’s a move that protects Nike’s brand affinity by meeting culture with flexibility, not dilution. Other companies like On have carved out new ground by grounding performance in emotion and identity. This isn’t imitation, it’s defense. Just Do You ensures Nike evolves in stride with a culture already redefining power.

OUTCOMES:
This line would be easy to deploy across editorial, social, community strategy and broadcast. Think of it as a narrative pivot point, a scaffold that gives Nike more room to move without losing its core. Each person has their own unique story, reasons, and motivations that lead them to select Nike. The grandma who is on her feet all day, the librarian who walks to work. We want to tell these stories.

FRAMING THOUGHT:
“Just Do It” speaks to the grind.
“Just Do You” opens the gate.

CLIENT: The New Museum of Contemporary Art

SUMMARY:
A narrative pivot that repositions the Museum as a strategic partner to forward-looking companies, doubling membership revenue and compounding from 1% to 10% of total operating budget in 3 years.

Contribution:
Developed narrative framework, structured KPIs, CRM, cross-functional project management pipeline, and content strategy, and lead pool strategy designed to double annual revenue through high-tier targeting, peer-warmed leads, and compounding year-over-year value. Conceptualized and pitched independently; adopted into institutional relaunch plan.

The Context:
The New Museum, a leading institution in contemporary art, historically positioned its corporate memberships around prestige and perks—free admission, guest passes, and event access. But in a shifting landscape of reduced public funding and increased pressure to diversify revenue, this framing under-valued a potential revenue lever for the New Museum. To meet the moment, we had to reimagine the offer. Not as a philanthropic gesture, but as a strategic opportunity.

THE IDEA:
Forward-thinking companies from fashion to fintech already treat cultural proximity as a growth asset. They attend Biennales, collaborate with collectives, and fund design studios, not for status, but for foresight. The issue wasn’t product-market fit, it was narrative-market misalignment. These companies didn’t see the New Museum as a lever for innovation, because the Museum wasn’t speaking that language... so we pivoted. You’re not buying access to art, you’re buying access to:
• Early signals of cultural shifts
• Interdisciplinary thinking
• Spaces that catalyze unconventional conversations
And that makes your teams more:
• Insightful in product development
• Creative in marketing
• Strategic in long-term positioning

THE EXECUTION:
• Built a modular landing page with executive-calibrated messaging.
• Developed brochure collateral with flexible hooks for verticals: R&D, brand, creative, C-suite.
• Aligned event and benefit tiers with brand adjacency: youth culture, luxury, tech, progressive.
• Added real-world reframes and embedded social proof and scenario logic:
The language shifted from “supporting exhibition” to “strategic edge.”
• “Cultural foresight is a competitive edge. This gives our team a direct line to the ideas shaping the future.”
• “We can’t just react to trends, we have to predict them. This is our early warning system for what’s coming next.”
• “In innovation, timing is everything. This puts us ahead of the curve, affording us valuable lead time to upcoming trends and cultural shifts.”
• “My Head of Marketing was able to recognize a developing trend before it was fully fleshed out because they witnessed the source material 5yrs earlier at the New Museum.”

OUTCOMES:
The repositioning created internal clarity, external resonance, and strategic upgrade potential across the museum’s partnerships team. This allowed the New Museum to: • Re-enter conversations with agencies, innovation firms, and design-forward companies. • Speak to founders, CMOs, and heads of brand in their native language. • Raise the perceived value of membership beyond tax write-offs or hospitality. • It offered innovation companies a reason to invest in their own future. • Based on industry conversion benchmarks, we’re on target to 2x Corporate Membership Revenue this year, with YoY compounding leads to take corporate memberships from 1% to 10% of the Museum's operating budget within 3 years.

CLIENT: The New Museum of Contemporary Art

SUMMARY:
A playful but meaningful Hinge activation positioning the museum not as a static institution, but as a potential partner in lasting connection... inviting audiences to reimagine the Museum as a living participant in cultural intimacy.

CONTRIBUTION:
Originated concept and narrative strategy. Developed and pitched as unconventional approach to social; greenlit for production.

CONTEXT:
As the New Museum prepared to reopen after a major expansion, we wanted to do more than announce. We wanted to invite connection. Not a campaign. A gesture.
In a city saturated with “come see us,” we built something that asked:
“Who might we become if we matched?”

THE IDEA:
The Museum Makes a Hinge Profile
The New Museum joins Hinge as itself. Not as a mascot or a gimmick, but as an institution with curiosity. We trained a custom chatbot on the Museum’s archive. It uses Hinge’s bio cues to surface poetic, sometimes uncanny overlaps between users and the Museum’s themes: photography, memory, identity, avant-garde performance.
The tone.
Sincere. Playful. Slightly flirty, but mostly educational.
Top matches are invited to the reopening gala for a first date with the Museum.
Why Hinge, not Tinder?
Hinge signals long-term curiosity, not just short-term chemistry.
That aligns with our real ask: We’re not looking for a viral fling. We’re looking for something that might change us.

WHY IT MATTERS:
• Most users encountering the profile won’t know what to make of it. That ambiguity sparks curiosity.
• Matches screengrab, share, ask friends.
• That’s how it spreads: organically, socially, credibly.
• Users own the launch, surfacing signals for media outlet buzz.
• Earned media follows their lead.

CLIENT: Headspace

SUMMARY:
A UX and narrative refinement aligning Headspace’s onboarding with its core emotional value. After identifying a 63% drop-off, we slowed the first click to build emotional trust. If the product is presence, the page should exhale.

CONTRIBUTION:
Independently developed UX reframe and brand critique. Designed as a proof of concept for emotionally coherent onboarding in mindfulness-based products.

CONTEXT:
Headspace promises calm, but its homepage rushed the moment. Behavioral data showed a 63% drop-off rate—significantly higher than the 50% DTC benchmark. Though visually branded, the page felt like a pitch: fast CTA timing, feature-first copy, and visual clutter created dissonance between the product’s emotional promise and its digital experience. Users came looking for spaciousness, but they get conversion logic instead.

THE IDEA:
Slow the Entry.
Treat the landing page like the first breath of a meditation. The top of the screen becomes sky—still, expansive. At the bottom, just the crown of a head. Because our brains are wired to detect faces, this incomplete gesture invites instinctual curiosity.
You scroll—slowly—into the story.
Lead with feeling, not friction.. In that moment, they’ve already slowed. They’ve already participated. The UX becomes the first lesson in presence.

KEY MOVES:
• Shift copy from value props to emotional recognition.
• Delay CTA timing to reward stillness, not urgency.
• Frame the interface as a decompression moment—not a squeeze page.
• Use spatial metaphor: head + sky = “headspace” as visual, not just brand..

WHY IT MATTERS:
• This isn’t anti-conversion, it’s expectation-aligned brand performance.
• You don’t convert people from dynamic into calm, you present calm and invite them to stay in it.

OUTCOMES:
Immediately testable via A/B homepage flows, onboarding journeys, or creator-led walkthroughs.
It uses emotional coherence as a conversion lever, not just a brand flourish.

FRAMING THOUGHTS:
If the product is presence, the page should exhale.

CLIENT:
Duolingo

SUMMARY:
A culture-jamming campaign that turned negative user sentiment into brand love—by confronting criticism head-on with humor, transparency, and play.

CONTRIBUTION:
Director of Photography (video), Associate Production (video).

CONTEXT:
Duolingo was facing negative criticism from users, relating to the tone of the app's push notifications.

The goal of this campaign was to mitigate growing negativity while raising brand awareness.

By both acknowledging the validity of criticisms, while at the same time, getting in on the action with a comedic take, the Duolingo Push video/campaign distilled the negativity with humor, in the process, endearing the brand with its critics.

I served as Director of Photography and Associate Producer for the mock promo video (shot with actual Duolingo employees at their Pittsburgh headquarters), launched on socials, directing traffic to splash page: push.duolingo.com.