Mission

I'm a designer and manager by trade, with years of experience leading and building effective teams and powerful products. I focus on developing design strategies to best support artists around the world, starting with work at Etsy in 2012 and now as part of Netflix’s global studio. Beyond this, I'm also an artist, teacher, collaborator, and friend-from-the-internet who’s most excited when I'm helping to make awesome things real.

In my creative work, I cohabitate between the realms of art, theory, and technology. I've been a NEW INC mentor, a Rhizome contributor, a host of Living Room Light Exchange NY, an adjunct faculty member at Parsons/The New School, and a visiting critic at RISD—where I also earned my MFA in Digital Media.

While at RISD, I worked on two projects that are now archived in MoMA’s library. The first, "AutoSummarize," is a publication cataloguing algorithmically generated summaries of the top 100 most-downloaded copyright-free books. The second, "American Psycho," appropriated the entire text of the popular Bret Easton Ellis novel into a series of emails, and then saved the relational ads generated by the exchange. These internet-embodied projects went on to inform my project-based work, which continues to take a critical, curious, and often humorous approach to dissecting the many tentacles of our digital tools and habits. To learn more about my work, check out this essay I wrote about my project, the “Mechanical Turk Diaries,” for The New Inquiry.

Now?

Helping Storytellers at Scale

I'm at Netflix leading a team of talented designers who help the world's largest studio produce local-language stories in multiple formats for distribution across the globe.

Advising Talented Friends

I'm advising two friends' companies:

  1. Naomi Nomi — a brilliant new direct-to-consumer women's workwear shop in NYC that believes clothes should change to fit womens' bodies, and not the other way around.
  2. Weft — a company I helped get off the ground at RISD that now uses new technology to help artists create and order custom, high-quality woven textiles online.

Learning & Making

I'm following interests on topics of technology, contemporary art, design history, economics, and the future:

  • Studying the intersection of technology, economics, and anthropology.
  • Scheming more radical ways to fund artists with Kelani Nichole. If you have ideas, please reach out.
  • Collaborating with freelancers on a new sculpture and software for books.

After years spent living and working in NYC, I now live in LA. I’d love to hear from you, wherever you are, and can be reached by email or as @jsnhff on Instagram and Twitter (where I post every once and awhile.)

This website is a lightly edited and occasionally updated archive built on github pages with Jekyll. View the changelog.
Special thanks to Willa Köerner for helping create this thing.

Mission

I'm a designer and manager by trade, with years of experience leading and building effective teams and powerful products. I focus on developing design strategies to best support artists around the world, starting with work at Etsy in 2012 and now as part of Netflix’s global studio. Beyond this, I'm also an artist, teacher, collaborator, and friend-from-the-internet who’s most excited when I'm helping to make awesome things real.

In my creative work, I cohabitate between the realms of art, theory, and technology. I've been a NEW INC mentor, a Rhizome contributor, a host of Living Room Light Exchange NY, an adjunct faculty member at Parsons/The New School, and a visiting critic at RISD—where I also earned my MFA in Digital Media.

While at RISD, I worked on two projects that are now archived in MoMA’s library. The first, "AutoSummarize," is a publication cataloguing algorithmically generated summaries of the top 100 most-downloaded copyright-free books. The second, "American Psycho," appropriated the entire text of the popular Bret Easton Ellis novel into a series of emails, and then saved the relational ads generated by the exchange. These internet-embodied projects went on to inform my project-based work, which continues to take a critical, curious, and often humorous approach to dissecting the many tentacles of our digital tools and habits. To learn more about my work, check out this essay I wrote about my project, the “Mechanical Turk Diaries,” for The New Inquiry.

Now?

Helping Storytellers at Scale

I'm at Netflix leading a team of talented designers who help the world's largest studio produce local-language stories in multiple formats for distribution across the globe.

Advising Talented Friends

I'm advising two friends' companies:

  1. Naomi Nomi — a brilliant new direct-to-consumer women's workwear shop in NYC that believes clothes should change to fit womens' bodies, and not the other way around.
  2. Weft — a company I helped get off the ground at RISD that now uses new technology to help artists create and order custom, high-quality woven textiles online.

Learning & Making

I'm following interests on topics of technology, contemporary art, design history, economics, and the future:

  • Studying the intersection of technology, economics, and anthropology.
  • Scheming more radical ways to fund artists with Kelani Nichole. If you have ideas, please reach out.
  • Collaborating with freelancers on a new sculpture and software for books.

After years spent living and working in NYC, I now live in LA. I’d love to hear from you, wherever you are, and can be reached by email or as @jsnhff on Instagram and Twitter (where I post every once and awhile.)

This website is a lightly edited and occasionally updated archive built on github pages with Jekyll. View the changelog.
Special thanks to Willa Köerner for helping create this thing.