It's a New Year which means a new semester and new BIC faculty! A special welcome to four new BIC faculty who will be teaching advanced track courses in Public Relations, Management, and Creative.

B3010 Creative Concepts will be co-taught by Marina Beldiand Jessica Lomasson.

Marina Beldi is an Italian/Brazilian award-winning Associate Creative Director at Grey Group(soon to be AKQA Group). Raised in an entrepreneurial family, which lead her to be a stock investor at age 11 years old but she decided to experience different cultures and left home before turning 15. She started her career as a graphic & textile designer. Later she found herself in advertising, where she worked and collaborated on award-winning projects in agencies around the globe for brands like Grubhub, Intel, Nike, TAP Air Portugal, Faber-Castell, and many others.

After living in 10 different countries she found her favorite and now she's currently based in Brooklyn. Other than advertising, she has a passion for teaching the new generation of creatives at Portfolio Schools as well as cataloging her travels with photographs she has taken around the globe.For nearly a decade Jessica Lomasson has been a copywriter by day, and well...a copywriter by night most of the time too—presently as an Associate Creative Director at VaynerMedia. More importantly, she's discovered that the only thing she enjoys more than producing killer work, is helping others do the same. Which is why she founded Make Ads With Me, a community to help aspiring creatives find partners to build their portfolios, gain access to educational resources, and receive mentorship from industry pros. It's also why she can't wait to help even more creatives find their path by joining our BIC family.

B3010 Creative Concepts is an advanced studio course in the BIC Creative Track for the development of campaign concepts in two dimensions. Based on strategic thinking, students will have the opportunity to create a number of campaign concepts that unite “art and copy” with an eye towards further development and inclusion in a spec book – or pre-professional portfolio.B8515 - Content Marketing will be taught by Melanie Deziel, a keynote speaker, author, award-winning branded content creator and lifelong storyteller. Melanie is the author of “The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas”, and the Founder of StoryFuel, which teaches marketers, creators and companies of all sizes how to create better content. Melanie was the first editor of branded content at The New York Times, a founding member of HuffPost’s brand storytelling team, and served as Director of Creative Strategy for Time Inc.

Content is an increasingly important marketing and branding tool for reaching, engaging and retaining customers, and yet, few of us were trained to come up with enough ideas to satisfy the endless platforms and purposes we need content for. Using a simple and flexible framework, this intensive course will get your creative juices flowing and teach you how to generate a seemingly endless number of unique and compelling content ideas to build your personal brand or that of an organization.

B3012 Design and Portfolio Development will be taught by Art Director and BIC alum, Castro Desroches BIC '16. Castro was born and raised in New York. Most first-generation Haitians born in the U.S. traditionally have parents who inflict a great deal of pain upon them in molding them into doctors, lawyers or anything else they perceive as practical. Thankfully, Castro’s parents didn’t take that path, and by chance he still turned out great.
Castro attended school at the City College of New York for both his undergraduate degree in Design and Multimedia and his graduate degree in Branding and Integrated Communications. Castro started at Droga5 right after graduating from BIC and just before his portfolio was featured in an AdWeek story titled “This Art Director Put His Entire Portfolio on Instagram.”
Castro's impressive resume includes a number of high profile spots such as Beats by Dre, Rivian Twizzlers, Under Armour, Prudential, Google, Instagram Portfolio, Viral Status, “Ezra” and Mozilla Firefox.B3012 Design and Portfolio Development is an advanced studio course in the BIC Creative Track where students work individually and in art director/copywriter teams to bring conceptual ideas to life via design skills, polished writing, and design software basics in order to enhance their existing campaigns and produce new work, for inclusion in their spec book and to be uploaded to an online portfolio. Final critiques will include a formal portfolio review with industry professionals.

Welcome to the BIC family! We're so excited to have you on board and can't wait to see the work you do with our BICsters!