Hi - I’m Slava, a filmmaker and creative at heart, with over twelve years of experience in advertising.

I started as a filmmaker, earned an MFA in Cinema, and fell into advertising almost by accident — a temporary job as an internal video editor that turned into a career. That career has unfolded at Credit Karma, and it’s been invaluable: I got to grow up alongside a company that went from scrappy startup to an established, well-known brand, and along the way I wore a lot of hats — brand strategist, writer, producer, manager. Each one stretched my skill set in a different direction, and each one sharpened the same instinct: don’t just tell a good story, find the real insight underneath it first.

That’s the throughline, and it’s been in my DNA since before Credit Karma and long after: creative storytelling, collaboration, and the actual making of things. It’s what I brought to Locked Out, a feature length documentary about housing inequality where I served as Creative Director and Executive Producer. And it’s what I bring every day to Cool Dad Coffee, a mission-driven coffee brand I started with two friends to redefine modern fatherhood and eschew old tropes of toxic masculinity — where I’m Creative Director, content creator, strategist, and marketer all in one, writing, directing, and producing all our video content myself. In the process, I’ve become an expert in generative AI production tools, using them to write, score, and edit short films at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional shoot.

Everything I’ve built over these twelve-plus years — the strategy, the production knowledge, the range of roles — has only made that throughline stronger. I’m not stepping away from any of it. I’m moving more intimately into the part of it I love most: being hands-on, close to the idea, in the room with real collaborators making something worth making.

Outside of work, I like to paint, design old school cyanotype t-shirts, and fight for economic and social justice, civil rights, and the environment. When the world is on fire, being neutral is not an option. I make no apologies for that