Senior Director, Brand Storytelling and Creative

Position Summary:

The Senior Director, Brand Storytelling and Creative plays a critical role in shaping how the university expresses its values, priorities, and aspirations through integrated storytelling and creative execution. This role oversees communications, writing and editorial strategy, graphic design, visual media, social media, and content production.

The Senior Director is responsible for translating Vanderbilt’s brand strategy into compelling, cohesive, and high-quality expression across platforms and audiences. This position ensures the university’s brand comes to life through distinctive visual identity, powerful narrative, and strategically aligned creative work. At its core, this role oversees how Vanderbilt’s brand expression is interpreted, activated, and produced — creating what is needed to effectively tell the institution’s story.

In addition to creative and editorial leadership, the Senior Director champions the thoughtful integration of technology, tools, and evolving platforms to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of storytelling and creative production. This leader fosters a culture of digital fluency and continuous improvement, ensuring teams are equipped to deliver high-quality, on-brand work with speed and agility while upholding appropriate standards for governance, ethics, and brand integrity.

This position reports to the Chief Operating Officer, Communications and Marketing and serves as a leader within the Communications and Marketing (MarComm) division. The Senior Director has supervisory responsibility over a multidisciplinary team of writers, editors, designers, videographers, photographers, social media specialists, and content strategists.

About the Work Unit:

The Communications and Marketing team at Vanderbilt University is a dynamic and deeply collaborative group. The division, with all of its departments and sub-teams, serves as the institution-wide center of excellence for communications and marketing, developing and executing strategies that inform, engage and inspire others to participate in Vanderbilt University’s global academic and research mission. The division is a key strategic adviser and partner for other divisions in the university, providing comprehensive plans and thoughtful analysis on messaging opportunities and constraints. The Communications and Marketing team continuously seeks innovative solutions to new and emerging challenges in order to deliver results at scale to advance the larger mission, values and priorities of the university.

Key Responsibilities and Expected Performance:

Brand Storytelling and Creative Direction

• Oversee the development, creative direction, and execution of Vanderbilt’s brand storytelling strategy across internal and external touchpoints.

• Serve as the creative a