I have been and always will be an artist. It started with school folders covered with sketches. I doodled everywhere. Art was my earliest form of self-expression and escape. Elementary art classes and shows along with a love of comic books fueled my fire. Some of my first design clients were my very own high school and a local chiropractor.
Visual art wasn’t my only safe place. After singing about rainbows in second grade, Mrs. Hanson said that I had a beautiful soprano voice, and I should join the choir. I did. This seed would blossom into a love of vocal music and performance.
This love of the arts has evolved into a love of creative problem solving. My earliest dip in the problem solving pool was as Co-Founder, Artistic Director, Marketing Director, Graphic Designer, Composer, Arranger and Performer for Fourth Avenue, a professional touring a cappella ensemble that has shared the stage with the Beach Boys and The Temptations and released several albums.
I avoided being a starving artist by also working as an adjunct voice instructor and graphic designer for Wright State University’s Department of Theatre, Dance, and Motion Pictures. During that time, I learned a lot about building and marketing a successful brand and was recruited to work with Wright State’s Office of Marketing to help with the university’s enrollment campaign.
While at Wright State, I was also hired as Outreach and Education Director for the Clark State Performing Arts Center and directed Project Jericho, a collaboration between Clark State Performing Arts Center and Job and Family Services of Clark County that changes lives through the arts. In Project Jericho, I essentially filled the Nonprofit WarriorTM roles of Arts Administrator, Marketing Director, Development Director, Teaching Artist, Graphic Designer, and Multimedia Designer to name a few. Under my leadership, Project Jericho more than tripled its soft dollar income with over a million dollars in grants and contracts and won a national Coming Up Taller Award in 2008 from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
After being recognized at the White House as a Champion of Change in Arts Education in 2011, I submitted a proposal for a new degree program for Clark State College that merged the arts and technology. With the blessing of college administration and working with local businesses to identify employment needs, I successfully submitted to the Ohio Department of Higher Education to create the Associate of Applied Business in New Media.
For Clark State, I also redeveloped the Associate of Applied Business in Graphic Design to align it better with industry needs and worked with local employers to design and submit a successful proposal to create the Bachelor of Applied Science in Web Design and Development for Clark State. As Associate Professor of Graphic Design and New Media, I now get the honor of passing on creative problem solving skills to the digital artists and designers of tomorrow at Clark State.
The problems keep coming because my employers and clients know that DawsonCreativity looks at problems differently – that my creative approach will be complimented by an attention to detail and careful planning. They know I expect more of my work and myself than they could ever expect from me.
Hopefully, you are here because you have problems that need creative solutions.
Let’s talk.
Scott
Learn more about my creative problem solving history at LinkedIn.