About — Alexis Monette

Résumé

The record.

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Creative direction · AI governance · systems

Alexis Monette

Creative Director × AI Architect × Studio Founder

Most creative problems are structural problems in disguise. Find where the structure broke and build it back stronger.

DIRECTOR, CREATIVE & AI INNOVATION
UNIWORLD GROUP
alexismonette.com
museshift.com
avm@alexismonette.com
BOSTON

01Currentagency seat · independent studio

Director, Creative & AI Innovation

UNIWORLD GROUP

JUN 2022 — PRESENT

Campaign direction for Ford, TD Bank, Northwestern Mutual and Pernod Ricard — concepting through post, on set with talent and crew. Selects directors and production partners; manages and mentors the creative team.

FORD — F-150 and Bronco 2H 2025 · Essence Fest, 100×100ft footprint · HBCU "Accelerating Brilliance."
NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL — Belonging & Impact, a year-round creative system spanning 33 observances; season-three podcast redesign.
PERNOD RICARD — Detroit cultural-presence program · Cowboy Noir BHM poster system · eight-week radio remote across three stations · NBMBAA.

AGENTIC PLATFORM

Audited the agency's creative intake end to end and is architecting UWG's agentic platform, built on the AI policy, compliance framework and governance program below.

GOVERNANCE

Leads the agency’s AI program. Wrote the UWG AI Working Policy (May 2025). Co-authored the Human Edge framework; designed the compliance framework and the four-session 2026 training curriculum. Runs biweekly governance; maintains the Approved Tools list, AI Tagging System, Language Watchlist v1.1. Original behavioral research across the creative organization — held internal.

Founder & Creative Director

MUSESHIFT — INDEPENDENT STUDIO

NOV 2025 — PRESENT

Brand strategy × AI infrastructure × nervous-system instruments × behavioral compatibility. One studio, one operator. Clients: salon owners, beauty pros, artists, founders, agencies.

FIELD — real-time nervous-system intervention over SMS, converting "I feel…" inputs into micro-invitations in a ~60-second loop. Adaptive: learns which states precede others and which protocols land. 19,000+ indexed entries.
Coined a seven-state nervous-system taxonomy where no working vocabulary existed. First subject of her own instrument.
CINDER — autonomous agent, self-hosted, architected end to end.

02Awards & press5 Tellys

GOLD
Barbershop / F-150Ford · 2025 · Regional TVonly Gold in category
GOLD
From the Ground UpFord · 2026 · Series
SILVER
Dare to DiscoverFord · 2025 · Regional TV
SILVER
Alicia's StoryTD Bank · 2025 · Social, CSR
SILVER
Out The TrunkFord · 2024 · Social Series

ALSO

Shorty Impact Award Finalist, 2025 — Financial Services, with TD and Ogilvy Canada

Judge, AICP Awards 2025

The Drum Marketing Award 2026, Automotive — shortlisted

UWG named 2026 Ad Age Multicultural Agency of the Year

WORK PUBLISHED IN

Vogue · ELLE · Harper's Bazaar · Allure · InStyle · Cosmopolitan · Marie Claire · Glamour · Essence · Seventeen · Teen Vogue · People · Nylon

PRESS

Adweek · Ad Age

03The record19 years

2007 — 08
GREATER GARDNER CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Graphic Designer / Events Coordinator. Re-vamped the logo and all in-house materials; ran regional events across seven towns. Age seventeen.
2010 — 11
SOODEE · NEWBURY STREET, BOSTON
Creative Director / Events Specialist. Merchandising, social, collateral, e-commerce redesign, photo-shoots, retail buying.
2013 — 15
IGNITE SOCIAL MEDIA · RALEIGH
Digital Art Director at the first social media agency in the US. Defined its "premium creative" service.
2015
MAYBELLINE NEW YORK · L'ORÉAL
Freelance Senior Designer — US point-of-sale and packaging. Redesigned the 2016 store walls.
2015 — 16
STRIVECTIN
Senior Digital Designer. In-house lead for web, e-commerce, email and social; flagship site redesign; supervised freelancers.
2016 — 22
BEAUTY@GOTHAM · McCANN WORLDGROUP
Art Director → Senior Art Director → Associate Creative Director. Global 360 for Maybelline NY, Essie, Lindt. Launched one of Maybelline's most successful foundations in Asia. National print across thirteen titles.
2022 →
UNIWORLD GROUP
Creative Director, then AI Strategy & Governance Lead from 2025. The longest continuously operating Black-owned agency in the United States, founded 1969.

04What I work with

CREATIVE

Creative direction
culturally driven advertising
brand strategy
art direction
campaign development
event creative
prop design
production budgeting
on-set direction
pre and post
casting and styling
team leadership
multicultural storytelling
brand identity and voice
moodboarding and storyboarding
set design
social strategy
e-commerce and digital strategy

CRAFT

Typography
zine design
book arts
ephemera
identity and web
copywriting
creative coaching
photography
photo retouching
video editing and motion graphics
digital and print design

LEADERSHIP

mentorship and team development
hiring and talent development
freelance and vendor management
contract and vendor-rate negotiation
resource allocation and workload planning
client and stakeholder communication
cross-functional collaboration
public speaking and workshops
facilitation and culture statements
brand consulting
creative operations, intake and approval routing

AI & SYSTEMS

Policy authorship
governance frameworks
training design
approved-tools curation
AI tagging
language watchlists
risk modeling
agent engineering
autonomous AI
MCP server design
Qdrant vector stores
NocoDB schema
n8n orchestration
self-hosted infrastructure
AI ethics and responsible use
prompt engineering
LLM integration
generative application development
AI image, video and voice production
API integrations
Harvard Agentic AI Intensive, certified

SOMATIC

Polyvagal theory trained (Porges, Dana)
Somatic Experiencing literate
trauma-informed
seven-state nervous-system taxonomy
behavioral compatibility research
intervention design
20+ years embodied nervous-system research

TOOLS · DESIGN & MEDIA

Photoshop (expert)
InDesign (advanced)
Illustrator
Premiere Pro
After Effects
Lightroom
Final Cut Pro
Figma
Claude Design
Procreate
Canva
Gamma
CapCut
FFmpeg
tldraw
Are.na
Pinterest

TOOLS · AI GENERATION

MidJourney
Runway
Higgsfield
Sora
Stable Diffusion
Stable Video Diffusion
DALL·E
Leonardo AI
Ideogram
Gemini image
Replicate
Pixellab
ElevenLabs
D-ID
Descript
Whisper

TOOLS · AI MODELS & AGENTS

Claude
Claude Code
ChatGPT
Gemini
OpenRouter
Ollama
PyTorch
Hugging Face Transformers
Sentence Transformers
CLIP
mem0
custom MCP servers
Telegram bots

TOOLS · DATA & AUTOMATION

n8n
NocoDB
Qdrant
PostgreSQL
PocketBase
SQLite
SilverBullet
Notion
Obsidian
Airtable
ntfy

TOOLS · INFRASTRUCTURE

DigitalOcean
nginx
Docker
PM2
systemd
Tailscale
Syncthing
Let's Encrypt
fail2ban
code-server
Git and GitHub

TOOLS · APIS & SERVICES

Twilio
Resend
Pinterest API
Microsoft Graph
Telegram Bot API
Google APIs
Wix API
Are.na API
Cloudinary
ImageKit
Firecrawl
Tavily
Jina
Brandfetch
Logo.dev

TOOLS · AGENCY & WORKSPACE

Workfront
Ziflow
Microsoft 365
Azure administration
Box
Google Workspace
Fireflies
Plaud

TOOLS · BUILD & PLATFORMS

Python
Node.js
FastAPI
Flask
HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Playwright
Android
Tasker
KLWP
Good Lock
WordPress
Squarespace
Shopify
Wix

05Education

BFA GRAPHIC DESIGN · Massachusetts College of Art and Design · 2008–2012 — the first freestanding public college of art and design in the United States

HARVARD AGENTIC AI · certified

What I do

Three practices, one throughline.

Direction

Brand systems, campaigns, platforms. Strategic creative leadership across digital, social, TV, print, experience. Set the aesthetic and defend it.

Build

Agents, tools, sites, APIs. Write production code. Autonomous AI with memory, state, voice. Small systems people actually use.

Theory

Vocabularies, manifestos, design languages. Write the rules my own work inherits from — then publish them so other people can too.

Clients

Who I have made work for.

At UWG · 2022–now

At Gotham · 2016–2022

At Ignite · 2013–2015

In-house + independent

Core beliefs

What I build is what I believe.

The source owns the signal.

Coin your own language.

Maintenance is the posture.

Memory is practice.

Measurement is armor.

Refusal is design.

Hire me

Ready when you are.

Take on a small number of projects each quarter outside of UWG. Consulting, creative direction, AI advisory, bespoke tool builds. Always culturally anchored, always honest about what I can and can't do.

avm@alexismonette.com

Creative directionBrand systems, campaigns, launches. End-to-end or collab with your team.

AI advisoryGovernance, ethics, prompt architecture, agent design. For orgs building responsibly.

Custom toolsSmall systems with big opinions. Bespoke sites, agents, internal tools.

alexis monette