pro
Taryn Fahoury
Brand & Creative Strategist. The foundation for brands.
New to Contra
Taryn is ready for their next project!
PORTFOLIO WEBSITE
Client: Bjorn G. Amelan (Artist)
Bjorn is a visual artist whose paintings, made on antique French hemp bedsheets in Sumi ink, acrylic, and vinylic emulsion, have been exhibited at New York Live Arts, The Garage NYC, and Longhouse Foundation, with works held in the collections of Agnes Gund and 21c Museum Hotels. He came to me through a personal connection, introduced by my brother Jonathan, who photographs for both of us.
The ask on the surface was a portfolio website. What it actually required was translation. Bjorn had strong instincts about how his work should feel but no framework for getting those instincts into a site. That gap is exactly where I work.
I started with feeling before structure. His work is intimate and monumental at once, made from the sheets he and his husband sleep on, hung like tapestries, dense with imagery that rewards the longer you look. The site needed that same quality. Unhurried, material, serious without being cold.
Everything followed from that. EB Garamond for the typography, warm off-white and near-black for the palette, a single scrolling home page with the full body of work presented chronologically. No decorative accents. No color beyond the artwork itself. The work speaks for itself and the design gets out of the way.
The build is hand-coded in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no CMS, deployed via Netlify. I also developed a full photography brief for 19 works that needed reshooting, including a shooting guide diagram, and coordinated the reshoot with the photographer.
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BRAND PARTNERSHIP PITCH DECK
Client: Kiss My Face / Serena Wolman (Creative Founder)
Kiss My Face is an underground dance variety show in NYC, now in its 8th iteration. Professional dancers from NYC Ballet, Juilliard, and Broadway performing in immersive nightlife environments. Founded by choreographer and director Serena Wolman, it sits at the raw intersection of high art and underground culture.
The work here was taking something that feels undeniable in a room and making it legible on paper to a brand or sponsorship audience. Those are two very different things.
I started by getting clear on the feeling KMF actually creates. Unleashed, unfiltered, uninhibited. Front row access to something you can't see anywhere else. That feeling became the foundation for the pitch, because the real value for a brand partner isn't the impressions. It's the cultural credibility that comes from being embedded in something this specific and this real.
From there the strategy shaped the narrative. What KMF is, why the moment matters, who shows up and why that audience is valuable, and what a brand partnership actually looks like in practice. Then I translated all of it into a full deck, built in the visual language of the show itself.
The goal was a pitch that felt as bold and considered as the experience it was selling.
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CREATOR COLLABORATION PITCH
Client: Serena Wolman (Creative Founder)
This one started with a creative concept that already existed. Serena Wolman, an independent director and choreographer, came with a vision for a content collaboration with the brand Vibram. My job was to figure out how to position it for a brand audience.
The work was understanding who Serena is at her core, her curiosity, her relationship to movement and culture, and translating that into something Vibram could see themselves in. Not as a sponsorship, not as an influencer play, but as a real creative collaboration. Someone whose perspective and presence would generate content that didn't look like an ad because it wasn't one.
The pitch had to make that value exchange legible. What she brings, what the brand gets, and how it would actually live in practice on their social channels. Strategy first, so the creative vision had a business case underneath it.
Vibram hasn't moved forward yet, but the deck is the proof. The work is in the translation, taking a creative's world and making it land for a brand audience. That's the part I'm built for.
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PERSONAL BRAND SHOOT
Client: GRCE Projects (My Personal Brand)
When I decided to do a brand shoot for GRCE Projects, I had to answer the same question I ask every client first. What do I want people to feel when they encounter this?
What kept coming back was an open invitation. A presence that makes someone feel safe enough to really go there. That feeling, safety, trust, ease, became the brief. Not a mood, not an aesthetic, a feeling. And everything else had to flow from it.
The concept came from that feeling. "Join me at the table." From there I built out the three visual territories that would hold it in frame: the presence, the invitation, and the emotion. The moodboard, the styling, the location, the shot list, all of it traced back to the same feeling underneath.
What I learned doing this for myself is that when the feeling is clear first, every decision gets easier. You stop second-guessing the styling because you know what it needs to feel like. You stop debating locations because you know what the space has to hold.
The result was a body of work that became the foundation for everything GRCE Projects is built on visually. Shot on film by Remy Young.
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PERSONAL BRAND STRATEGY
Client: GRCE Projects (My Personal Brand)
I ran my own framework on myself before I ran it on anyone else. That felt important.
Starting with the feeling was the hardest part. I had to sit with the moments where my value actually landed, the conversations, the ones where something shifted for someone and I could feel it. What kept surfacing was safety and trust. An open invitation to really go there.
From that feeling, everything else followed. Who GRCE Projects is for, why the work matters, what makes it different, where it needs to live, and what gets built first. The feeling didn't just inform the brand, it became the foundation for the website, the shoot, the content, all of it.
I don't think you can ask someone else to go through this process if you haven't been willing to do it yourself. So I did.
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