Studio Director

Responsibilities

• Lead the studio design team to ensure consistent standards, equitable resourcing, and aligned ways of working across both teams.
• Provide steady leadership by building trust, clarifying roles and responsibilities, supporting change adoption, and creating a shared operating rhythm.
• Translate the Head of Studio’s vision into actionable team goals, staffing plans, workflow improvements, quality expectations, and measurable operating practices.
• Establish and reinforce studio governance, including intake expectations, prioritization, escalation paths, approval procedures, version control, file release standards, and communication protocols.
• Lead workforce planning and resource allocation for assigned accounts, workstreams, or capability areas, balancing capacity, skill mix, deadlines, business priorities, and team development needs.
• Monitor industry trends, innovation (AI and automation), production technologies, design tools, and workflow innovations to strengthen studio capability.
• Proactively explore, test, and pilot emerging tools.
• Manage, coach, and develop studio managers, designers, production artists, and other studio team members through clear expectations, feedback, performance conversations, career development, and succession planning.
• Create an inclusive, collaborative studio culture that values flexibility, accountability, craft excellence, operational consistency, transparency, and respectful partnership across teams.
• Oversee project timelines, budgets, priorities, risks, dependencies, and quality control to ensure studio deliverables are completed accurately, efficiently, and on schedule.
• Partner with Creative, Account, Strategy, Operations, and Production leadership to align scope, staffing, milestones, client expectations, production requirements, and final delivery standards.
• Guide the extension and translation of approved creative concepts into production-ready digital, web, presentation, and print content while ensuring work remains aligned to brand standards and project direction.
• Represent the studio in senior-level meetings by providing operational insight, staffing recommendations, risk assessments, delivery updates, and solutions that support business and client objectives.
• Identify opportunities to harmonize tools, templates, file structures, documentation, automation, reporting, and process standards across the integrated studio organization.

  Qualifications

  • 15+ years of experience in studio leadership, creative production, production design, design operations, graphic design, or a similar agency or creative services environment.
  • Proven experience leading multidisciplinary creative production teams, including managers and individual contributors, in a high-volume, deadline-driven environment.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead teams through change, integration, process transformation, or organizational growth while maintaining morale, clarity, and delivery quality.
  • Strong understanding of studio operations, including intake, resourcing, prioritization, quality control, approvals, asset management, prepress, mechanical builds, file preparation, and final release.
  • Portfolio or work samples that demonstrate strong design judgment, production excellence, brand consistency, and execution across digital, presentation, web, and print channels.
  • Adept at moving fluidly across a broad range of creative execution — including digital, print, motion, video, 3D, and emerging tech platforms.
  • Advanced proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite and strong working knowledge of presentation tools such as Keynote and PowerPoint; experience with Figma, Sketch, XD, email/web workflows, motion, or video tools is a plus.
  • Excellent written, verbal, and executive communication skills, with the ability to synthesize milestones, risks, recommendations, and decisions for senior leaders and cross-functional partners.
  • Strong analytical, organizational, problem-solving, prioritization, and decision-making skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities under tight deadlines.
  • Ace's, Bachelor's, or BFA degree preferred in art, graphic design, production art, advertising, communications, or a related field; equivalent experience will be considered.