I was born in Southern California, the daughter of an artist and aerospace engineer (a detail that I think will become more salient as you read the rest of my bio).
I left high school after the 11th grade to study at Simon’s Rock College of Bard, a very odd and wonderfully enriching place in Western Massachusetts. I had long dreamed of going to film school and so when NYU accepted me into theirs as a transfer student, I was New York City bound.
I spent a number of years after college traveling and working stationed right by the side of a motion picture camera as a camera assistant — the very best way, I’ve always thought, of learning the myriad of different moving parts that come together to make a movie.
During this time, I also worked as a story analyst for Dimension Films, churning my way through 500 zombie scripts, a number of wonderful and sadly forgotten genre novels from the 1950s and scripts for movies like Memento and Donnie Darko before they became films.
My writing muscles duly exercised, I began working as a copywriter, crafting snappy taglines and brand identities for entities as diverse as Lexis-Nexis, dating sites, high-brow books, and cable television. You might have seen my work on billboards, bus-sides, magazine ads, web banners and cable television commercial breaks.
My first month on the job at Lifetime Television, I had the opportunity to spin some titles for a Lifetime Original Movie. The CEO at the time picked one of mine, and A Date With Darkness: The Andrew Luster Story was born.
I took a bit of detour to study writing at Columbia University, and when I returned to the world of work, it was for VisitBritain, the agency responsible for marketing British tourism to American.
There, in 2007, I was appointed “social media champion” (mostly in a bid to get me a company-paid trip to Britain). At first I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I immersed myself in blogs, Facebook Pages, Twitter and much more in order to understand how to use social media for marketing purposes.
I recognized even then that great ideas for social can come from anywhere — and formed and led a social media working group that included everyone from senior management to folks from customer support. The project we worked on together — a Facebook fan page for American fans of British movies and television — quickly gain steamed, and now has over 50,000 fans and counting.
My next adventure consisted of building the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s foundational digital strategy from the ground up: including social media channels, a video program, email and online marketing, and the first co-branded web destination for New Directors/New Films and a social media-rich web destination for the New York Film Festival 2010.
Last fall, I launched Jellybean Boom, which is a blog and consultancy aimed at delivering the same sort of value I supply organizations like The Film Society and VisitBritain — effective, collaborative and low cost promotional strategies in the online space.
I joined the social media optimization startup SocialFlow in April of 2011, where I work to raise visibility for and market a technology that takes social media to a whole new level of sophistication.
Personal passions include: dogs, Prospect Park, Instagram, Twitter, interactive storytelling, This is Spinal Tap (esp. the DVD commentary track), coffee, great food, making the impossible possible.
