Corbin Thomas is a father, an artist, and a marketing and brand leader.

Born in Ohio, he came to the work through sound before image. He toured the United States as a professional musician across several album releases, and learned marketing because the band needed it. Someone had to make the record look like something, build the audience, budget the tour and get people in the room. He did that work for himself first, then for other artists and small businesses who needed the same thing, and found he was as interested in the image around the music as in the music itself. He still brings a musician's sense of tempo and pacing to how a story unfolds on screen.

He trained in technical audio engineering at the Recording Workshop, then earned a BFA in Time-Based Media at Columbus College of Art & Design.

He began in live production, creating tour and stage content for Britney Spears, NSYNC, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas, and Avicii at Coachella, where he co-created one of the earliest large-scale projection mapping installations, blending multiple projectors into a single animated environment.

In 2007 he founded Wellcan Still & Motion Media, with his college roommate and continued tour work for Ricky Martin, LMFAO, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Baby Gangsta, Nelly Furtado, and the American Country Awards in Las Vegas. He held a a multi-year partnership in the hair industry with various salons including Scott J NYC & Aveda that carried through to New York Fashion Weeks. He also worked on a new product launch series of touch screen laptops for Hewlet Packard featuring the Far East Movment. He also produced work for Bonneville Seattle and the Seattle Seahawks.

Seeking less travel and more family life he took a fulltime position as Global Creative Director at Magnanni, the Spanish footwear and leather goods house, he was responsible for how the brand appeared in the world, across visual campaigns, digital and the retail environments. He set the visual standard for the brand and the seasonal rhythm the house still works to when launching product. He represented the brand at Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy for four consecutive years.

At Donaldson he stepped into a different niche to both learn and bring the same sensibilities to the the marketing function from previous industries. He directed an end-to-end brand transformation, new site, to raise the visual standard to match the work being done at the practice, across three service lines and two locations.

He still makes music, moody and cinematic, built from guitars, vocals and analog synthesizers, where the instrument is a machine you have to understand before it gives you anything and the constraint is the point. The same interest runs through the rest of his work: what a new tool makes possible, what it costs, and what has to be done to the thing it gives back. He approaches emerging marketing technology the same way, learning it well enough to hold its output to a standard rather than accepting what it returns.

He grew up in rural Ohio, around his father’s hobbies woodwork and blacksmithing, cabinetry and old architecture, and in antique shops, where he learned to read a period by its details, what things were timeless, and what were trend.

For him, strategy and execution have always been one job. Coming up in production taught him what the work should look like and what it should cost, and that knowledge sits underneath every decision he makes about a brand.

He lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, son and daughter.