I'm a brand and creative leader who's spent more than a decade building brands at scale. Today I run all of brand and creative at Guild Mortgage. That’s design, social, photo, video, and production, with a bench of agencies and vendors behind them. Before that I was at Rocket, where I led design teams of up to twenty and served as the in-house creative lead through the company's Fortune 500 rebrand.

I got here the long way. I started in fashion design, then retail visual merchandising, where I learned that a brand either works in three seconds or it doesn't. A master's in new media design at DePaul turned that instinct into a career, and I've been translating it across everything a brand touches since.

Here's what I believe: brand guidelines are a floor, not a cage. Brands are living things, they evolve or they die. My job is to empower creative teams to adapt and push the limits without losing the essence of the brand. Rules aren’t fun. Creativity is.

Off the clock I do all the normal stuff… travel, crafts, reading, cats. I played in a few bands back in my Detroit days, and I'm a certified yoga teacher, which comes in handy in this line of work.