Hi, I’m Carly Eiseman, an LA-based artist, research producer and strategist, immersed in the world of contemporary art, music and technology.  You may ask – what do you do? I will answer quoting a phrase of Ed Ruscha’s, one of my favorite artists. I do, “one of many things.”

What I like to do most is creatively solve problems by employing my arsenal of hands-on and AI-assisted research methods. My most recent projects involve mentoring early-stage startup founders around all aspects of customer user experience; producing weirdmerch.com, a compendium of strange culture merch found around the web, co-producing the community and conversation series, Music Book Club with the writer Tamara Palmer, and painting at least 1 postcard every day. 

From 2016-2024, I was the research programs lead at Spotify, across Spotify for Artists research, where my team facilitated innovative global studies amongst the musician and industry community and worked to build artist page expression features like Artist Pick and Canvas, as well as monetization features like Listening Parties and Merch.  Prior, I created and ran the global influencer program at Rdio, working across verticals including artists, labels, brands and festivals to evangelize creativity in streaming. Our influencer program was the first of its kind in streaming and helped support my beliefs that streaming democratizes global fandom and that artists are the best curators to lead listeners through catalogs.

I’m a former youth culture ethnographer and editorial director for music, travel and art content like Flyer Magazine, Marriott’s TheLobby.com and Park Hyatt’s Artphaire.com, where I interviewed influential artists including KAWS, Daniel Arsham, Mickalene Thomas, Vik Muniz, Tom Sachs and Kehinde Wiley, alongside curators such as the Brooklyn Museum’s Anne Pasternak and MoMA’s Paola Antonelli. These conversations informed and inspired the development of my own practice which began in 2017 simply by beginning to paint.

THE ART PART:

My life and career have been deeply informed by conceptual art and I like to argue that the best marketing could probably also be art.  I love the challenge of long durational art, which is probably why I created the project, 1 Album A Day, a 2-year long project where I listened to a different record every day and paired it with painting at least 1 new work a day, crafting a unique dataset of color, sound, location and temperature.  

Inspired by my writing teacher’s advice to give away what I need, in 2023, I offered the public a free piece of art if they filled out a short survey where they shared the answer to the question, “who is your favorite artist at the moment and why?” In return, I mailed responses to their answers and 365 postcard paintings around the world from the US to India, South Africa, Colombia and beyond.

This directly inspired my on-going project, “Today,” a participatory art practice where viewers are taken through written or oral prompts to produce their own work while listening to music, transforming every member of the audience into artists. If you’ve read this far along, please know I’m always open to leading this practice anywhere in the world and if we work together, I will drag you to see a lot of art. (And you will thank me.) 

Get in touch if you want to collaborate or want to hire me for creative consulting at carly@carlyeiseman.com.