About
Melissa Severin is a marketing, communications and brand storytelling leader currently living in Austin but she will always be a Chicagoan at heart (Go Sox!). Her work has always been about translating complexity into meaningful messages that bridge knowledge gaps. She knows how to find stories—often hiding in plain sight—and the talent or trends that are about to break through.
Before advertising and corporate communications, she spent years as a publicist at Drag City Records, working with musicians and comedians from Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Silver Jews to Joanna Newsom and Neil Hamburger. She helped land Newsom's first late-night TV appearance on Jimmy Kimmel—early evidence of her ability to see what matters before everyone else does. From there, she moved into AdTech, serving as spokesperson for ShopLocal (local search before all search was local) and conducting some of the first research around Cyber Monday at Performics. She's produced hair shows with a broken foot, conducted research with world-class stylists in Germany, and built indexes that shaped industry benchmarks. Most recently at GSD&M, she repositioned a 54-year-old creative agency so the industry finally recognized its integrated capabilities across strategy and media—not just creative—winning the agency's first Ad Age A-List recognition and transforming how the agency was perceived. She's equally comfortable spotting emerging talent and collaborating across data, creative, and executive teams.
She holds a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry. Her poems have appeared in various journals, and she's published two chapbooks through Dancing Girl Press: Brute Fact and Atlas of Essential Monsters. Her writing explores memory, place, and the gothic undertones of everyday life—the same instinct for hidden meaning that drives her professional work.