Elan Cole is a designer, writer, creative strategist and leader, practicing for over 20 years. With a unique skill for finding the narratives behind design and branding problems and bringing them to life across all mediums, he helps businesses develop and express their voices and connect to audiences in honest and emotionally powerful ways. As Executive Creative Director and co-lead of the Creative/Content Team at NYC & Company, Elan’s role is to focus and amplify the voice of the City of New York around the world. With a multidisciplinary group of creators, he is responsible for developing and delivering solutions through film, design, editorial content, photography, environments, digital experiences and so much more. The team’s work has won many recognitions, including most recently an Emmy® for their film Famous Original NYC. Prior to his current role, Elan helped re-imagine global businesses for Jet Blue, Johnson & Johnson and Infiniti Motors, and designed Santeria candles for a small Botanica up in the South Bronx. He has prototyped his own line of leather goods under the Monday Party brand, and re-positioned, re-branded and redesigned China’s number one facial care brand, Dabao. He has worked with his curatorial and artistic idols at the Museum of Modern Art and PS1, and designed comic books for Marvel. These juxtapositions of scale and reach are helping him inspire new generations of designers. Elan teaches branding at the School of Visual Art’s Groundfloor Incubator and recently collaborated with ArtCenter’s Berlin TestLab satellite on innovations for the travel and hospitality industry.