Jacob Kemp
Jacob Kemp is a creative director, designer, and writer whose work focuses on clarity, storytelling, and building uncommonly motivating brands and ideas.
In 2025, Forbes Contributor Afdhel Aziz wrote: “the world needs visionary leaders like Jacob Kemp, whose audacious moral imagination is only matched by the excellence that his world-class design and innovation studio TALISMAN can deliver.”
His work has received two Gold Awards in the Graphis International Competition, for Design and Advertising. He was also the recipient of the Silver Grand Prize at the Fifteenth Annual Solas Awards for his personal essay ‘The House Within’ reflecting on creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic. SPINE Magazine named Kemp an emerging designer to watch in cover design, key art, and illustration. His work has been featured by Communication Arts, It’s Nice That, and The World Illustration Awards. He has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University/Teachers College Arts Administration Program, Parsons/The New School, and New York University.
Kemp is also an actor known for creating roles on stage, film, and television, having appeared in Black-ish, Why Him, Newsies, and Broad City. Kemp also received a SAG Award for his work as a cast member of the celebrated series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Instead of coloring inside the lines, organizing his life into clear divisions, he encourages the strange, beautiful, funny, unpredictable, poetic, messy, honest pieces to come together, and lets them weave a story entirely their own. While the client list and portfolio is diverse, at the heart of his work lies two things: storytelling and identity. Whatever the medium, no matter the scale, his projects all align with one theme: the way we create reflects the way we live our lives.
Jacob graduated from Yale cum laude with distinction in the arts, where he was the recipient of the Glenn de Chabert Prize, the Louis S. Gimbel Scholarship, and was a Yale Trust of Boston Scholar.
He commutes between New York and Boston and is terribly grateful for Amtrak.
