I’m Katrina!
A creative strategist BUILDING…
A STUDIO
WHERE culture AND DESIGN MEET TO find THE MAGIC AT THE MARGINs
I build from what other people overlook.
A cultural reference, a childhood memory, a shift in how people gather, a story a brand keeps telling about itself. I pay attention to the details that reveal what matters now and what might matter next. I bring lived experience, years spent designing for people inside complex spaces, and a deep curiosity about culture into the same room.
That’s where my creative strategy begins: not with a trend to chase, but with a more interesting question to ask and a world worth building around the answer.
“The most interesting ideas begin where people stop seeing the margins as the edge of the story and start seeing them as the source.”
-Katrina Elise
15+ years
creative Strategy
new possibilities
cultural intelligence
For more than fifteen years, I’ve been building things where culture and complexity meet.
I’ve started programs from scratch, shaped new roles, advised leaders, and found ways forward when the resources were thin and the room wasn’t ready. Working across entrepreneurship, education, and organizational change taught me how to read more than what’s happening on the surface: the history in the room, the assumptions driving a decision, and the possibilities people haven’t named yet.
Now I bring that way of seeing into creative strategy. I connect cultural insight, lived experience, and design to help shape stories, experiences, and new ways of building that feel both imaginative and true.
My perspective was shaped as much by life as by work: study and travel, inner work and reinvention, and a lifelong fascination with how people make meaning. What we keep. What we display. How we signal belonging, perform success, survive change, and decide what is cool.
Moving through different places and communities has taught me not to assume I understand a person or a culture at first glance. I stay curious long enough to notice what the obvious answer misses.
Through Funkfile, videos, conversations, and creative projects, I follow the threads connecting culture, design, identity, wellness, and becoming.
Sometimes that means naming the politics beneath a cultural moment. Sometimes it means asking why an experience feels so good, so off, so beautiful, or so strangely exhausting. And sometimes it means making room for pleasure, reinvention, and a little well-earned drama.
This is where I think in public, test ideas, and let the questions lead somewhere unexpected.
This space is not about keeping up with every algorithmic wave. It’s for people who want to develop taste, lead with a point of view, and build things with more depth than a trend can hold.
If you’re making a story, a brand, an experience, or a new way forward—and you’re willing to look beneath the obvious—you’re in the right place.