Creative Technology & AI Leader

I never had a traditional art education: no portfolio school, no design degree. What I had was an obsession: I stayed an extra year of high school just to keep taking every art class on offer, one credit short of graduating on time. After school I split my time between working my way up to Assistant Manager at Sam Goody and a year at Pica Printing in Parsippany, NJ, learning the guts of a two-color press: stripping negatives, burning plates, lining up registration marks by hand. Then a customer at Sam Goody turned out to be a Creative Director at a healthcare ad agency, and a conversation about a boxing-themed mixtape somehow became a job interview. I didn't get the artist job. What I got, on October 16, 1996, was a position as an Administrative Assistant to the Manager of Production.

I was a bad administrative assistant. Every chance I got, I snuck off to the scan room to help digitize sketches for Photoshop and QuarkXPress. People started seeking me out. I taught myself Photoshop while digital imaging was still new, and started showing creative teams faster, more flexible ways to work than the airbrushing and hand illustration they'd always used. What had been a technical, print-production function became a creative one, and I built and led teams inside it for the next three decades.

Nearly thirty years and more agency transformations than I can count on one hand (Torre Lazur into McCann, rebranded to Echo, folded into McCann Health NJ, consolidated into Studio Rx, and now part of Omnicom Production), I've been the through-line of craft and client relationships every time the org chart changed underneath me. When creative leadership recruited me back after a two-year independent run, it wasn't for a title. It was to keep elite-level production capability in-house rather than let it walk to a competitor.

Along the way I've held real titles (Digital Design Supervisor, Creative Imaging Lead, Supervisor of Digital Arts), but the leadership that's mattered most has usually happened off the org chart: teaching dozens of colleagues Photoshop technique over two decades, then more recently running hands-on AI training and lunch-and-learns off the back of a Halloween mascot campaign that became the studio's proof of concept for generative AI in production. People have generally come to me before I had the title for it.

The newest chapter is the same instinct pointed at generative AI. I built my agency network's Firefly Custom Model and AI-production capability from scratch and used it to take a 20-plus-asset brand rebrand from concept to delivery in ten days, five times the previous production speed, later documented by Adobe as a case study in generative AI for healthcare marketing. As more agencies race to build proprietary AI systems, that's precisely the work I do: turning emerging capability into workflows practitioners will actually adopt, at production speed and pharma-grade quality.

None of this was a plan. My whole career has been gravitating toward whatever's newest and most interesting: the day Generative Fill left Photoshop beta, I was already deep into it. My real asset isn't any one skill; it's curiosity, the ability to learn a new tool fast, and thirty years of craft instinct for making things look right once I do. I lean on AI where it's the faster path and traditional technique where it isn't, whatever gets the frame right.