Derek Smith

What I'm looking for

I'm looking for fully remote contract work as a client-facing producer or project manager — ideally owning an account or studio end to end rather than executing someone else's tickets.
I work best with autonomy over process, direct access to stakeholders, and a manager who tells me what the actual problem is in media, healthcare, and mission-driven organizations.

I'm a creative producer and project manager who has spent 10+ years making complicated asks ship on time with everyone still speaking to each other.

Right now I run multiple studios for various teams at Creative Circle, managing rotating remote benches of five to forty freelance creatives across video, digital, print, and editorial for clients including Elevance Health, Amgen, Vanguard, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Before that I led the brand voice and website reimagination for the Rodgers & Hammerstein estate. And before that — my favorite brag — I built and showran a live interactive game show inside SCRUFF, a 20M-user app for queer men, growing viewership from 800 to 13,000+ in four months.

The corporate lingo (search-friendly) version: client services, end-to-end production, cross-functional stakeholder management, creative operations, contractor onboarding and utilization, workflow documentation, change management, content strategy and agile, remote team leadership.

The real version: I'm the person who makes a forty-person freelance bench feel like a small, well-run room. Freelancers stay. Clients come back.

I like a messy brief, a hard deadline, and a team that trusts each other by week two. Brooklyn-based, remote-native, fluent in Workfront, Monday, Asana, Airtable, and Adobe CC — and reasonably good at knowing which one a client actually needs.