I’m always up for taking the leap...

I'm the type of person who will try everything twice - once to see if I like it and a second time to find out how much. With a multi-hyphenate, mixed-industry career journey, work has never really felt like work to me. It’s all been part of the joy ride - a winding, exploratory road of following my gut, exploring my endless drive to design, and finding time for a bit of soul searching.

I get antsy because…

My wandering, insatiable curiosity is always on the hunt for a new project, a new brand, or new skill to master. I don’t really believe in the idea of your typical New Years resolution, but prefer to dive into the New Year with a New Year - New Skill mentality. I opened and owned four businesses, two of which we’re co-owned, and two sole proprietorships. None more or less successful than the others, but some certainly with better timing and necessity than others.

I love a strong handshake and direct eye contact.

Smith Hall is what I like to call ‘the main house’. It is the centralizing studio structure for everything that operates around it as cottage businesses. It is named after my freshmen year dormitory at Northeastern University - a reminder of that uncomfortable feeling you face when you first meet your new roommate, haven’t yet met your future close friends from down the hall, or that nervous tingling of meeting your new colleagues and collaborators at your morning meeting in your new office.

I approach my life with the memories of these fleeting moments. Call it hedonistic, but the honest truth is that handshakes and eye contact have always turned into fast friends and respected professional connections. And my personal favorite part of the human experience is to forever be respectful in order to be respected back.

Past, Present, but mostly Future

Today, I teach at SCAD as a professor in Fashion Marketing and Management, focusing on inspiring young creatives to find their voice through visual communication, branding, advertising, art direction, and their adjacencies.

I simultaneously run SMITH HALL STUDIO - an exploratory, mixed-discipline design studio that focuses on understanding the human side of interior architecture and design, branding, design strategy, art direction, editorial, and visual identity work for clients and small businesses around the U.S. (and abroad!).

But no matter what I’m doing or where I’m going, design for the sake of facilitating honest human behavior, and design as an acting driver in the discovery and representation of our individual identity autonomy will always be at the core of what I teach, build, design, and do.