“I am drawn to narrative forms that move from describing change to creating it. Rowen pushes the boundaries of what creative collaboration can accomplish when art, commerce, and activism discover they need not remain separate worlds.

‍

“This project has brought together collaborators who’ve never shared the same creative space: designers working with luxury fashion houses to create biodegradable couture, data scientists translating NYC Open Data into performance art, Broadway veterans collaborating with environmental activists. These intersections didn’t exist until Rowen demanded they exist.

‍

“What we’re building is a new form of environmental storytelling, one where the protagonist literally transforms from activist to solution. When Rowen is planted as a garden at journey's end, we're proving that the most powerful narratives turn inspiration into action.”

Jacob Kemp is a creative director, designer, and writer whose work focuses on clarity, storytelling, and building uncommonly motivating brands and ideas.

‍

Jacob is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of TALISMAN. 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.”

In 2023, his work 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. In 2021, 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, Kemp’s projects align around a single conviction—that art and design belong to everyone, and that story is one of the most powerful tools we have for change.

‍

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 Boston and New York and is terribly grateful for Amtrak.