Hi. I’m Slava, a filmmaker, coffee roaster, and advertising ninja. But can I be honest? I don’t like advertising.

Not the craft — the stuff it usually turns into. The lowest-common-denominator, focus-grouped-into-oblivion, forgettable-by-design stuff that clutters every feed and screen. That dislike is actually the reason I’ve been good at this: when you refuse to make something forgettable, you go looking for a real human insight instead, and you tell an actual story instead of running a script. That’s been true since day one, and it’s the whole reason a decade-plus at Credit Karma worked.

I think in a way that doesn’t map cleanly to one lane — left-brain and right-brain, associative, more than a little ADHD. I can hold the strategy, the spreadsheet, and the story beat in my head at the same time, and I’ve built a career finding the connections other people miss between them.

I started as a filmmaker — MFA in Cinema — and fell into advertising by accident. Storytelling and production instinct pulled me in deeper than I expected, and over twelve-plus years at Credit Karma I built real things: an internal content studio from scratch, production systems and processes, teams shipping broadcast, digital, and social work at scale. I’m proud of that — it’s not something I’m walking away from or apologizing for. But somewhere in the climb from writer to manager to systems-builder, I drifted from the thing that got me into this in the first place: actually making things.

So I’m bringing it all back with me. Everything I picked up running a brand’s creative engine — strategy, channel fluency, knowing what actually works versus what’s just noise — is coming along into hands-on storytelling. Not a step backward. An evolution. I want to make good advertising: work people actually want to watch, that respects them enough to say something true.

Locked Out, a documentary about housing inequality where I served as Creative Director and Executive Producer, is proof that instinct never left. So is Cool Dad Coffee, a mission-driven brand I’m building with friends — it’s where I’ve taught myself to use AI video tools to write, score, and edit short films at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional production. I’ve gotten genuinely good with those tools. I just refuse to worship them. They’re one tool in the kit, not the point.

Outside the work, I care about the same things I try to put into it: economic and financial justice, civil rights, the environment, human rights. I’m not trying to be neutral about any of it.