Hey ya'll. I'm Jessika.
I’m a creative strategist and dot connector for the people, places, and platforms where culture is made, kept, and transformed.
SERVICES
Your creative thought partner
​Your problem isn't your team size. You'll always need more capacity. It's your playbook.
Our history reflects our humanity. The cultural arts are how we feel it. Most small cultural arts teams already know their audiences have changed. They feel the gap between who's showing up and who could be. But knowing and doing are two different things when everyone in your marketing department is wearing multiple hats at the same time.
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I've held roles in fundraising, marketing, communications, graphic design, grant writing, and event planning, often several at once. The old playbook, the one built for bigger budgets, larger staffs, and audiences who came just because you opened the doors, doesn't fit your reality anymore.
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I work as a fractional creative strategist and extension of your team, embedding with small teams at museums, galleries, arts organizations, conferences, individual artists, and cultural initiatives to co-create strategies rooted in your reality, not borrowed from someone else's. Best practice is a framework. What actually works gets built from the inside out, with your staff, your board, and the communities you actually serve, because borrowed strategies don't know who's in your room.
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Brand Narrative Strategy
THIS is the foundational work; defining your pillars, voice, positioning, and the narrative arc that makes every program, post, and conversation feel like it's coming from the same place. When it's done right, audiences don't just understand who you are. They see where they belong in your story.
Content Strategy and Storytelling
Your content should feel like somewhere people want to be, not a bulletin board they scroll past. This is the work of turning your brand narrative into content that actually moves; stories told in your voice, on the channels where your audiences live, with design that looks like it could only be yours. Not just a megaphone. A conversation.
Audience Engagement and Growth
Together, we honestly assess how you're currently showing up. This includes programming, your outreach, your events and identifying the gap between who's in the room and who could be. Because the organizations losing audiences aren't failing at mission. They're programming for themselves instead of the people they exist to serve.
Workshop Facilitation and Speaking
Sometimes you need a room reset. Sometimes you just need someone who's been in the weeds to help you see clearly again. Whether it's a full-day staff workshop, a board retreat, or you need a sounding board this is practical, no-fluff strategy work built around where your team actually is.
CLIENTS AND COLLABORATIONS
I love the company I keep.
Every engagement is a collaboration. Here are a few of the organizations and brands I've had the privilege of building with.
ABOUT ME
The first brand I ever worked on was my own.
I was the kid who was tasked with making sure everyone remembered it’s Jessika with a K. To this day, elementary school classmates still say it when they see me. From there, marketing and branding just kind of came naturally for me.
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I've spent fifteen years working with and in mission-driven organizations across education, civic life, and cultural arts — because the work that's always moved me most is the work that asks something of people.
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As Senior Director of Strategic Communications at Teaching Lab, I shape how one of the country's leading education nonprofits tells its story. Before that, as Director of Communications for the National March for Science, I helped give voice to a national movement at a defining cultural and political moment. And earlier, in-house at the Houston Museum of African American Culture and the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, I learned what it means to build narrative for institutions that hold history, where getting the story right isn't just strategy, it's stewardship.
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That's the thread. Whether it's a classroom, a march, or a museum, I'm drawn to the places where communication is grounded in meaning-making.
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The arts is where that instinct runs deepest for me. The little girl who fell in love with museums on a second-grade field trip never really lost that appreciation for these spaces. And in a world hungry for art, beauty, and belonging, I keep coming back to the same belief: the creative arts aren't a luxury. It's how we find each other.
Now for the (kinda boring, but important) stuff:
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I hold Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mass Communication and Media Studies, and I've been recognized as a 2021 National Trust for Historic Preservation Diversity Scholar, a 2020 Google News Lab Fellow, a 2018 Facebook Community Leadership Fellow, and a 2017 Association of African American Museums Burroughs-Wright Fellow. I currently serve on the Advisory Board of the Houston Arts Alliance.
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