“We are not here to make pretty.” —Dudnik-Ptasznik

Julia Dudnik-Ptasznik was born in 1970 in St. Petersburg, Russia; living in New York since 1988. She is principal and creative director of Suazion, a consultancy which specializes in marketing strategy development, copywriting, and graphic design. Her portfolio includes work for companies and organizations such as the United Nations, Bertolli USA, Sprint PCS, The Fragrance Foundation, and Domino's Pizza. In addition, Julia teaches ethics, business, and professional practices at the Advertising-Graphic Design Department of the NY-based FIT, the college from which she holds a BFA (hons.) in advertising design. She is also the founding editor of Visual Arts Trends, a quarterly state-of-the-industry publication.

Her online exposure to date has been limited to commercial work, but due to the extraordinarily wide range of her talents - writing, poetry, music, photography, drawing - we’ve arranged for a first-ever personal exhibit at Scene 360. It showcases the combination of the various art forms, although you will see that Julia’s writing remains a dominant form of self-expression, giving strength and feeling to the imagery. “I recently realized that for me, everything starts with words. A concept is always verbalized before it's visualized. I think this explains my love for typography and its presence, if not dominance, in everything I create, from commercial to personal work. Looking back at my pre-college work, I see that it wasn't always this way; there was a time when I simply painted, for example. I think my advertising training has conditioned me to think along the lines of concept/headline/visual, even in cases where no words are part of the final piece. I rarely work in traditional mediums anymore, unless a commercial project calls for an illustration or a painting,” explains Julia.

Julia finds inspiration in psychology, human behavior, people - a fascinating subject that is explored artistically on a digital medium; “I almost always go with digital media, mainly because of the subject matter. Mostly everything I create has to do with real things and people, and I find that I can better express the intended message with tools that offer a greater degree of realism, such as a camera or even a scanner. I still sketch, figure things out on paper before going to the computer, but on the computer I inevitably end up.”