From designing casting flyers to art directing Bad Bunny in Tokyo

Kibria Chavez: I'm an art director at Spotify on the music marketing team – which is honestly my dream job. It's everything I've ever wanted to do: conceptualise and support music in any way, shape or form. Whether it's a concert film, an event experience, something made specifically for fans, or a billboard – just being in that artist world, able to move around within it, feels like such a sign.

That said, the path here wasn't exactly straightforward. When I applied to Shift, I was freelancing and taking on a really wide range of projects – sports merch, beauty brands, brand identity kits, all sorts of random things. Then I connected with another freelancer based in LA who produced music videos. He always needed casting flyers, so he asked if I could make them for him. They were for people like Doja Cat and Playboi Carti – really big names – and I remember thinking, I can't believe I'm making these. But I was so excited just to be doing it.

So when I applied for Shift, my book was a bit of everything, which I think worked in my favour. It read like: okay, she's in the beauty and branding space, but also the music space, and everything in between.

Matthew McConaughey has a book called Greenlights where he goes back through all his journals and realises that wherever he was in life was always foreshadowing the next thing. That's exactly how I feel looking back – making those casting flyers, going to those concerts – and now I'm making concert films for some of those same people. It's nuts.

Kibria Chavez: It depends on the project, but I'm usually juggling three or four at a time – which I actually like, because you get these wildly different things happening at once. We just did Billions Club, a Spotify franchise that celebrates artists with multiple songs over a billion streams. The most recent one was with Bad Bunny in Tokyo, and that was a huge concert film: conceptualising the set pieces, the stage, the activation, the merch. Now we're in post, editing everything together.

But then on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I might be working on out-of-home — billboards. The brief is simple: we want to support this artist, so what's a creative way to do it? My favourite billboard project is probably Playboi Carti. He's one of those really enigmatic, hard-to-read artists, and we did something deceptively simple. His fans hadn't heard from him in years, so we just asked them: what do you want to say to him? And we put it on billboards. We did one, and the next thing I knew, people were camped out waiting to see what the next one would say.

Kibria Chavez: I always like to say the Shift programme found me – as cheesy as that sounds, it really did. I had no idea what I was applying to. I should have known, but I didn't. My background is in graphic design, and I'd worked briefly in marketing before getting laid off. For all of 2023 I was freelancing, just building what I didn't realise at the time was my book. I needed money, I knew what I knew, and I just needed to pay my rent. Then in October 2023, I saw an Instagram ad for Shift – something like, "Are you a creative without a college degree?"

Full transparency: I actually did go to college, but I didn't end up with my degree at the very end. They had miscalculated my credits and put me in the wrong catalogue year, so the whole time I was there I was taking the wrong classes for the degree I was trying to get – which was wild. I participated in graduation, and then they called me afterwards and said, "Hey, we made a mistake." So I got a marketing job through a college friend – thank God – and then I got laid off, and I just couldn't get another role. I was back to freelancing.

By the time Shift came around, that ad felt like an infomercial aimed directly at me. It was the second-to-last day to apply. I looked back at the whole year and thought, I actually have a lot of work I can use – let me just close my eyes and see if I can get in.

Then Challenge Day came. I walked in and ended up connecting with some people I'd met that day who were in my group, which was really nice. We started Shift in January, and by March I was like, oh – I get what this is. I understand how serious this is. After that I just took it completely seriously. I told myself: I'm leaving here with something.

Kibria Chavez: Challenge Day was essentially the pre-selection round. I think there were about 15 people chosen from the application process, and we were split into random groups – random for us, at least, even if not for them. Complete strangers. We had about two hours to develop a full concept for a brief, so we had maybe 30 seconds to meet each other – what do you do, what do you do – and then just go. I don't even remember what our brief was, but we worked through those hours, presented to the group, and then they said goodbye. And from that, they picked the class.

Kibria Chavez: It really crystallised during an alumni session, where past Shift graduates came in to speak to us. One of them was Curt Saunders – he went on to be the producer for Shift New York – but when he came to talk to us he was working as an art director. As he was explaining what the role actually was, it just clicked. I thought, that's exactly what I should be doing. So I focused on refining my skills in that direction, which really comes down to a lot of mood boarding and a lot of writing. My design background helped too – I could present ideas in a way that held people's attention all the way through.

Kibria Chavez: When I first started, my manager asked me: "What do you want to do? What's your biggest goal?" I'd only been there about a month, and I said, I really just want a billboard in Times Square. He didn't even respond – he just kind of laughed and we moved on. I had no idea how standard it was. Billboard campaigns are pretty much part of every single project we do, so the next thing I knew I was designing one, and then it just went up in Times Square. And every time, you feel it – you just stand there like, this is crazy.

That particular one was part of a Sabrina Carpenter project, a listening party we did in LA to market the album. It's one of those moments where the scale of what you're doing suddenly hits you.