About

Kristopher Szumowski smiling in a black-and-white portrait

I'm an Emmy-nominated, award-winning Creative Director and Art Director with nearly 20 years of experience, including the last decade leading major work for Apple. I find the story a company needs to tell, set the visual direction, and carry it through to final delivery.

01 / Childhood

Early years

Computer programming was one of my first loves. I started programming at nine, and in high school earned IT and programming certifications meant for working adults.

I grew up in New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia, part of an emerging music, skateboarding, art, and design scene. Through art, music, and design I discovered my true talent: marrying abstract concepts to concrete visual design. That obsession stole my attention from my schoolwork, but it landed me a full-time job at a Los Angeles design and production studio right after high school.

02 / First 10 years of my career

Design & animation

It was not easy. I worked my way up from production assistant to junior designer, and eventually to project lead and creative director.

I spent the first decade of my career at Los Angeles studios designing, animating, innovating, and obsessing over the art. Over that time I was a part of and led many award-winning projects and teams, including two Emmy-nominated title sequences, one of them Netflix’s The Politician, and an ADC Award for the main titles of One Dollar, to name a few.

03 / Last 10 years of my career

Directing & leading

In 2016, Apple Marcom recruited me to lead projects at the start of their in-house motion department, and I have been a part of it ever since. Over the last ten years I have focused on leading projects, finding and telling product stories, and figuring out ways to push Apple's design, style, and aesthetic farther.

Just like my slow rise through design and animation, I worked tirelessly to understand how to be a great storyteller, and took every opportunity to work with great leaders and soak up all the knowledge I could. That passion, focus, and unwavering dedication eventually broadened into leading some of Apple's biggest projects and moments, working directly with Apple leadership: WWDC22, the 2021 Holiday campaign, the Apple TV launch, iPad Pro, Apple Watch, iPhone commercials, social media campaigns, and many cross-functional projects.

Solving some of Apple's biggest creative challenges and uniting many different departments and teams around a single vision has been some of the most rewarding work of my life, and something I feel I've been uniquely able to do because of nearly twenty years of dedication, learning, and seeking out knowledge wherever I could find it.

I still love doing animation and design work myself, and I have always been a very hands-on director and leader.

04 / Lifelong passion

Building with AI

At the same time, in parallel to my leadership work at Apple, the world was catching up to my lifelong passions: computer-driven art, machine learning, and thoughts of digital consciousness. I was spending nights and weekends learning how to put machine learning into practice, with tools like TensorFlow and later PyTorch, and soaking up every paper published to arXiv about machine learning and later “AI.”

For the first time in my life and career, my two passions were starting to cross paths: the hands-on world of art and design, and the high-tech world of machine learning. Algorithms were starting to be able to create images and art. Early papers, from GANs to diffusion models, and most impactful for me, the “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” paper from 2015, showed that computers could actually participate in the creative process.

In 2016 I combined neural style transfer with optical-flow research to build and publish a temporally consistent AI-video pipeline, roughly five years before comparable commercial tools existed. I have kept building since: a multi-agent harness for knowledge work, and Shared Canvas, an AI-native collaborative workspace.

To this day, I am endlessly fascinated by every new discovery and tool that helps us tell better stories, improve productivity, and understand ourselves and the world around us better. I want to continue working for the people and companies that are changing the world. I want to continue learning, growing, and put my lifetime of skills and experience to work on some of the biggest creative challenges.

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