Hi, I’m Monica.
Design Director, founder and creative leader.
"Joy in human form."
Taylor Smyrnos, my colleague at Everyday Health
Best and strangest compliment I've ever been given. It arrived at Christmas, as a gift, and I've thought about it ever since — because it names the thing I'd actually put at the top of a résumé if anyone let me.
Not the design skills, or the QA skills, or the dozen others curiosity has handed me along the way. The real one is that I want to bring joy into whatever I'm doing, and I put relationships ahead of projects and deadlines. Teams do their best work when someone protects that.
My mission
What I actually do is lead transformation.
Creativity is a health practice. People keep the habits that feel like play. So I lead transformation the way I'd design a product — make the hard part worth doing, and leave room for people to be themselves inside it.
Now: Design Director at Ziff Davis (ex-Google, ex-Smule). Founder of SPARK + REBEL and Sparkpick. Creator of Voices in Jessica's Head.
What I do
Creative direction & design
Creative direction · art direction · set design · costume design · product & graphic design · eco fashion
Movement & dance
Hip-hop · contemporary · locking · zumba · taekwondo · musical theater
Stage & screen
Filmmaking (SF School of Digital Filmmaking) · theater (Minsk youth theater) · acting at Margie Haber Studio · improv at National Comedy Theater
Languages
English & Russian (fluent) · German & Spanish (conversational)
The story so far
Nine chapters, one direction.
Chernobyl hit Belarus a month before I was born, and the USSR collapsed five years later. I grew up watching a whole society rewrite what it believed. Transition became my default setting — it still is.
My first business was drying medicinal herbs for the local pharmacy. My second was sequin appliqués on denim, sold to girls at school. I was eleven when I started cutting up grandma’s clothes to make something else.
I landed in San Francisco at twenty with $1,000 and enrolled in psychology — Basic Instinct had convinced me I should be a psychiatrist. I paid for it waiting tables, often double shifts. I was ashamed of that then. It’s the part I’d keep.
Eight years in tech, on products I’m still proud of, and almost no room to make anything. So I went looking outside the job: art direction, fashion styling, filmmaking, my first installation. Nights and weekends, for years.
I went back to school for graphic and UX design at Berkeley Extension and made it to the final class two days after my fourth baby. Two years and four hundred applications later, I was designing VR at Google.
I watched The True Cost and learned the fashion industry pollutes on the scale of the oil industry. It made me open my own closet and look properly. Ksu and I started Sparkpick that year.
SPARK + REBEL grew out of the blog’s DIY content: modular, unisex, one-of-one. We launched digital first on DressX, then physical pieces in vegan cactus leather. Every garment has to do more than one job.
My best friend Ksu and I went to the Edinburgh Fringe. I got a fever, our hotel sat above the Old Town, and beer kegs rolled over cobblestones until five every morning. I came home with a character and a clapping monkey.
Thirteen episodes so far, one a month. I write, direct, style and play every voice — five of them, cast from transactional analysis and a lot of therapy. It sold clothes. It also made me an actor.
Let’s connect.
Portfolio reviews and one-on-one sessions on branding, personal branding and storytelling — turning uncertainty into a direction, and concepts into results.
