Areas of Expertise: Visual Design, Human-centered Design, Enterprise Design Transformation, Creative Management, Creative Process, Design Research
Shawna is an Associate Creative Director at frog in Austin, Texas. She took a long and circuitous journey before landing her role at one of the world’s top design and strategy firms working with transformative thinkers from across the globe. After graduating with a painting degree from The University of Houston, Shawna spent an entire year crying herself to sleep, unsure of the direction to take her life, career, and passions. Ultimately, the desire to elicit emotional connections between people and their world led her to start her career designing immersive exhibition experiences for The Holocaust Museum and The Rwanda Project. Shawna went on to complete the Masters in Advertising program at The University of Texas at Austin where she created award-winning fake ads. Putting her skills into practice, she spent five years working in digital advertising, creating strategic campaigns for a variety of clients, before making her way into product design and creative management. She now leads multidisciplinary teams through the human-centered design process, infusing her spirited drive for design excellence and love of storytelling in order to inspire collaborative innovation.
In addition to leading experienced teams, Shawna also works with enterprise clients to help build and scale user-centered design capabilities within their organizations by teaching and training internal teams on design thinking methodologies.
When she’s not designing, Shawna dreams of saving (even more) homeless animals and investigates the complexities of human relationships in order to become a better leader, manager, and mentor. But really, she’s always designing.

[Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.]