Jody Van Swearingen

SVP - Creative Director, AbelsonTaylor Group

Jody Van Swearingen has led teams in dozens of product launches and global campaigns at independent health care ad agency AbelsonTaylor Group. Van Swearingen excels at extracting insights from volumes of data and generating creative work that resonates. As a mentor and advocate of gender parity, she has helped staffers—many of them women—advance at AbelsonTaylor or go on to successful careers elsewhere. Van Swearingen joined AbelsonTaylor in 1997 as an art production manager and advanced to more senior positions on the creative side, combining knowledge of design, concept development, branding and typography.

Name a medical condition, and chances are Jody knows all about it. Name a medium, and trust Jody to know the best way to use it. Name an award, and odds are Jody has won it. Bring up architecture, theatre, design, art, Doctor Who, Haruki Murakami, and Adventure Time, and Jody can chat about them all. Enthusiastically and thoughtfully.

But when you get down to it, Jody is a designer raised on the tough side of the Second City. She doesn’t hesitate to take on a challenge. She won’t stop working until the job is done well. And she sure as hell knows how to have a good time—and to make sure the people she’s working with have one, too.