Brett Wiseman | Art Director | Illustrator

I'm a creative leader with an art director's eye, an illustrator's instinct for visual storytelling, and a systems-oriented approach to creative production.

The work I enjoy most is visual, hands-on, and often a little complicated. I like figuring out how an idea should look, how to make it work in the real world, and how to make the process better along the way. That might mean directing a photography shoot, developing an illustration, shaping a visual experience, or figuring out how a large body of creative work can be organized and made more useful.

I like being close to the work. I want to understand the details, but I also want to know why we're doing something in the first place and whether there's a better way to get there. How can we make the work stronger? How can we make the process work better?

Ultimately, I like making things that are visually compelling and useful, solving the problems that inevitably come with creative work, and leaving the process better than I found it.

📷:@matthewsumi

EXPERIENCE

Creative Lead - Photography & Visual Design | Microsoft (May 2023 - Present)

• Lead strategy, creative direction, and end-to-end photography production for Microsoft’s global events, independently owning 10+ events annually from creative briefs and shot lists through crew selection, budgeting, vendor management, on-site direction, editing, and delivery. Bring deep expertise in photography, image-making, and post-production to direct crews and ensure quality from capture through final delivery. Direct teams of up to four photographers and two photo editors for events serving 20,000+ attendees

• Develop global photography strategy and creative direction for Microsoft AI Tour, establishing a unified visual approach across ~40 events in 35+ countries. Partner with regional teams to implement the creative vision while overseeing centralized asset delivery, archival, and reuse.

• Collaborate directly with Microsoft leadership teams, including the offices of Satya Nadella and Judson Althoff, to plan and direct executive photography.

• Develop designs and illustrations for event experiences and branded materials including t-shirt graphics, promotional merchandise, GIF animations, and large-scale installations.

• Designed and built the creative strategy, information architecture, taxonomy, metadata framework, governance, and user experience for a custom digital asset management platform on the Imagen Reuters platform. Redesigned the platform’s front-end experience and managed accessibility, privacy, security, and compliance requirements with Microsoft development teams.

• Transformed Microsoft’s event photography archive from an outdated, folder-based server into a searchable, scalable visual library exceeding 90,000 assets. Established workflows for ingestion, tagging, permissions, archival, and reuse while continuously expanding the archive with historical and current photography.

Art Director, Illustrator & Visual Designer | Freelance (May 2019 - May 2023)

• Provided art direction for e-commerce and editorial photography across major retail and lifestyle brands, including Nordstrom, Nordstrom Rack, Tommy Bahama, Amazon, and Eddie Bauer, directing studio and on-location productions.

• Led photography for Nordstrom Rack’s national Kids and Young Adult campaigns, including Back to School and Holiday. Collaborated with creative and marketing teams to define production needs, then planned, cast, and directed shoots in Seattle and Los Angeles for photography used across digital, in-store, and out-of-home advertising.

• Directed elevated e-commerce and editorial photography for Tommy Bahama, overseeing studio productions for men’s and women’s fashion with an emphasis on styling, hair and makeup, talent direction, and highly polished imagery aligned with the brand’s premium positioning.

• Directed and evaluated photography in real time across concurrent e-commerce studio sets, using deep expertise in image-making and post-production to assess every frame, approve or reject imagery, direct reshoots, and provide precise retouching direction. Managed the visual quality of high-volume production from capture through final image.

• Extended client work beyond photography into illustration and design, creating visual assets and artwork for branded and editorial applications.

Art Director | Nordstrom (September 2012 - May 2019)

• Directed e-commerce and editorial photography across two concurrent studio sets, managing the visual quality and production of high-volume men's fashion imagery from capture through retouching. Evaluated photography in real time, approved or rejected frames, directed reshoots, and provided detailed retouching direction to ensure consistent, on-brand imagery.

• Planned and directed editorial fashion campaigns for Nordstrom Kids, including Back to School, Holiday, and Anniversary Sale. Interpreted campaign briefs and led product selection, styling, casting, photographer/crew selection, creative decks, and studio or on-location production, directing teams of up to 20 people.

• Helped evolve Nordstrom's e-commerce photography operation from traditional low-volume production toward a higher-throughput digital workflow, collaborating with photographers and stylists to establish more efficient shooting practices and increase daily production to 65+ garments per set.

Senior Digital Image Editor | Nordstrom (June 2012 - September 2012)
Digital Image Editor | Nordstrom (January 2005 - June 2012)

• Developed retouching standards, automated Photoshop actions, and workflow processes for Nordstrom's Designer photography, reducing average retouching time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes per image.

• Established visual and technical standards for Designer editorial photography and trained/onboarded new retouchers, ensuring consistent image quality across editorial and e-commerce production.

• Retouched high-volume e-commerce and editorial photography, specializing in color correction, skin and beauty retouching, apparel and product cleanup, compositing, and complex image manipulation while maintaining rigorous visual and technical standards across Nordstrom’s photography production.

Photo Retoucher & Illustrator | Freelance (May 2004 - May 2019)

• Provided professional photo retouching for clients including Nordstrom, Nike, Facebook, NARS Cosmetics, Boeing, and Redfin, working across fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and commercial photography.

• Created illustration and visual artwork for clients including Moment App, City University of New York, Cambridge University Press, and Offbeat Empire, developing work across editorial, publishing, technology, and branded applications.

Lead Digital Painter | Hot Java Productions (2003-2004)

Developed color and lighting style guides and digitally painted hundreds of finished panels for a series of direct-to-video motion comics, establishing visual consistency across the production.

EDUCATION:

Ringling College of Art & Design: Bachelor of Fine Arts | Illustration