Getting to know me

Welcome to my website.

I am Danielle, and I'm glad that you're here.

I have illustrated this many times throughout my website, but I genuinely believe in the power of storytelling, and I really think that extending beyond just written words on a page is really important, especially when it comes to engagement and making sure to provide the right amount of context.

That is why I would like to share a bit more about my story with you here.

As you might notice, if you've looked at my resume, I've had quite a winding journey to some. To me, it's pretty normal.

I find myself being a really multi passionate person, meaning I love learning new things, and my interests run really deep. So anything that allows me to really flex my creativity anything that allows me to learn and perfect a new skill, and anything that allows me to just showcase what I have to offer through my perspective or through my historical skills, really excites me, and you'll notice that throughout my career.

So When I was younger, I went to College of Charleston, and at the time I thought that I wanted to pursue a degree in hospitality.

Turns out that was not my calling. I enjoyed my time there. I worked for the College of Charleston's Office of tourism and hospitality and really enjoyed my time and learned a lot but eventually I ended up transferring back to my home state of Maryland to go to the University of Maryland where I found myself studying journalism, specifically broadcast journalism.

This was a perfect major for me because you learn so many different skill sets from producing radio pieces. To using in design to create newspapers and magazines. And so I was really able to learn a lot, flex a lot of different skill sets, and produce work on a really regular cadence, which is super important to me.

Following that, or in the midst of that, rather, I found myself taking a lot of art classes, and historically I've been really interested in art mostly just as a way to, you know, get therapy of some kind or you know, use a different muscle.

So I ended up adding another degree in studio art, where my focus was mainly on sculpture.

I viewed this more as like an extracurricular I spent a lot of time working on my journalism projects and never really anticipated a future in art. Little little did I know?

When I graduated, I started my first role in the wedding industry as a wedding and commercial videographer, for two small businesses simultaneously, Monachete weddings, and Adora Creative.

In this position, I got a lot of experience in shooting, editing, and doing lots of other content related things, mainly writing blog posts or doing social media for the companies, I had a lot of great exposure during this job. We worked with publications like Washington and Magazine, and professional athletes doing promo videos for summer camps and things of that nature.

After this position, I sought just a change of pace and wasn't sure exactly what that looks like. So following that, I actually transitioned to becoming a barista in Washington, DC.

During this job, I had a very short tenure. I worked as a barista for two months.

And at towards the end of that tenure, I did an internship at Fashion Week in New York, where I thought that I wanted to take my videography skills, but life happens kind of crazily.

And when I got back from that trip, I discovered that my coffee company had an internal brand design and interior team.

And so I threw my hat in the ring and applied to become a fabricator and furniture designer on that team, I did a test day where I essentially ground metal for eight hours or so.

And the rest is history.

At that job, I learned from the ground up how to weld, a skill that I never learned in school. Mostly because I was a little too scared, to be honest.

And I really perfected the art of welding, and found it to be super cathartic and loved it.

So I progressed my career at Compass Coffee, the small business, in furniture design, spatial design, and fabrication, and continued to build a lot of things that you'll see on my portfolio and eventually became the manager of the build and design team.

This opportunity obviously was great for me in terms of growth. I learned how to facilitate meetings, plan installs, make sure to manage inventory and resourcing for my team as we were building out cafes at a pretty quick pace.

And as most of us know, when you work for a small business, you wear lots of different hats and I had no shortage of that during my tenure.

When COVID happened, that is when I took another pivot I decided that I wanted to explore a little bit. And so I looked for a job that was outside of my region in Washington, DC, and ended up getting a fabrication job in Denver, but during my research and I guess you could say exploration.

I did a lot of self discovery to figure out what it is that I enjoy because I have so many passions What is at the core of all of them? So I read a book called Designing Your Life, if you're familiar, which really helped me to hone in on the things that I'm interested in, which, to me, at the time, and now, were marketing and branding to be specific.

So after spending a year in my first furniture job in Denver, I knew that my initial exploration and thoughts were true, that I had sort of run my course in fabrication, at least when it came to working for others, So from there, I was looking to transition back towards my journalism skill set.

I found a position at two u and edx as a communication specialist and threw my hat in the ring and ended up getting that position.

During that time, I actually had a fairly seamless transition because although I was working for a corporation, my team ran sort of like a small business, which is what I was used to. So I wore a lot of hats again. I did everything from write copy for UX.

I created and managed an entire email marketing newsletter.

I wrote articles every single week. I believe I was at a cadence of one article per week at the time that I started that position.

I did a lot of internal communications, like newsletters, to socialize and communicate what my career team was working on.

From there, I was shifted to a content producer role.

In this position, I did a lot of similar things, took on a bit more in terms of multimedia production and sort of inspired and changed my team's strategy to date by making our content a lot more dynamic and reducing the amount of straight words that were on our different websites and email communications and so much more.

During this work, I did a lot of video production. I did some audio pieces. I continued to write.

Articles and did newsletters as well, and was able to flex an entirely new skill in graphic design, which I hadn't really done since college.

This was something I really found myself enjoying and being drawn to our career team and how our brand really tied in or aligned to the greater edx brand.

Fast forward to now, I am still with edx working as a content strategist I still produce content, so I still write articles at least every month on various career topics, and those articles contain multimedia such as graphics that I make or videos or audio that I create, but a lot of my work now has a bit more of a wide scope and a wide lens, where I do market research, have empathy conversations with stakeholders, look at qualitative and quantitative data and research from our user base, and take all of those insights to craft strategies across our team, whether that be for our career event offerings, our newsletter that we've been running for two years or even just our content on our digital products.

I really love this work. I love zooming out and discovering the why. I'm never afraid to question the status quo. And I believe that strategy is a perfect place for me to be for that.

And as I grow in this role, I'm taking on more responsibilities with branding strategy and having that be part of my role explicitly rather than the implicit work that I'd been doing for quite some time, even since I was a communication specialist.

So where do I wanna take my career? I am super interested as I've mentioned in branding alignment and making sure that messages get communicated both through words.

And through dynamic content that supplements and supports and compliments those words.

I really love flexing all of my skill sets. I love communicating what the through lines are between spatial design and content design.

It's all about expansion and contraction, and I think the world is so interesting, and I love thinking philosophically.

So I hope that I have illustrated a lot of that through this story and I hope that you have enjoyed, and I'm sure you have questions.

So feel free to go to my contact page to learn more about me and reach out, but thank you for listening. And I hope you have a great time looking through some of my work.