Production Designer · Creative Director · Côte d'Azur, France
Twenty years. Every room. Every world.
The work is serious.
Aren't we lucky to do this?
Photography available on request
Twenty years. Every room. Every world.
The work is serious.
Aren't we lucky to do this?
Photography available on request
Most creative directors own one discipline. James has spent twenty years mastering five, and moving fluidly between all of them. The range is the differentiator.
NBC · FOX · Emmy Awards · Golden Globes · Access Hollywood · SNL · Showtime · HBO · BET · MSNBC · beIN Sports · California Live
Formula 1 · COTA · Opening Ceremonies · VIP Experiences · MTV VMAs · Bar & Bat Mitzvahs · People's Choice
RED ONE · FAST X · F1 · Amazon · Universal · Apple · Berlin · Rome · New York · Universal Studios Theme Park
Westfield LAX · Whole Foods · People Magazine · Talent Interiors · Landscape Design · NBC News Brokaw Center
NBC O&TS · Quibi · Rotten Tomatoes · Snapchat · AOL · Yahoo · HBO R&D · Apparel · Automotive Campaigns
Twenty years. Every format, every scale, every category of the creative and production world. If it needs a vision and a skilled hand to realise it, James has probably done it.
At NBCUniversal, James worked his way up from Assistant Art Director to Production Designer and Creative Director over two decades. For over ten years he defined the visual identity of Access Hollywood and Access Hollywood Live, still on air today, and led the creative direction of NBC's Owned & Operated Television Stations digital and streaming division. He designed Emmy Awards Arrivals Carpets for NBC and FOX, including the multi-network environment broadcast simultaneously by NBC, E!, NBC News, and Access Hollywood.
The awards season circuit is a discipline he has practiced for twenty years. Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, SAGs, CMAs, Oscars. Broadcast presence for NBC, FOX, ESPN and others across every major show. He knows every position, every greenroom, every way a network looks exceptional or ordinary in the most scrutinised broadcasts of the year.
Beyond broadcast: Formula 1 opening ceremonies at Circuit of the Americas. Press event environments for RED ONE in Berlin, FAST X in Rome and F1 in New York. A complete broadcast facility for beIN Sports. A Showtime talk show with the creators of The Daily Show. Retail at Westfield LAX and Whole Foods. Interiors. Landscape. Advertising. Private celebrations.
Now permanently based in Nice on the Côte d'Azur, bringing that range, that calm and twenty years of hard-won trust to Europe's most compelling creative market.
Five disciplines. One creative director. Because the range is the point.
For over a decade, Production Designer for one of American television's most iconic entertainment franchises, defining and continuously evolving the visual world of Access Hollywood across hundreds of episodes, every awards season, and every major entertainment moment. A sustained, living creative relationship with one of the most recognized brands in entertainment journalism. The show is still on air today.
The major awards season circuit is a specialized, recurring discipline, and James has been working it for twenty years, starting as an assistant art director. Emmy Awards Arrivals Carpets for NBC and FOX. Broadcast presence, set positions, and talent greenrooms across the Grammys, SAG Awards, CMAs, Golden Globe Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, and Academy Awards. A People's Choice red carpet in Las Vegas, Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. Attending the Oscar Nominees Luncheon on behalf of Access Hollywood. Every year the circuit comes around, James brings two decades of compounded expertise to every inch of it.
Year after year on the Grammy Awards circuit, designing NBC's broadcast positions, set environments, talent greenrooms, and holding spaces. The Grammys operate at a scale and cultural intensity unlike any other awards show. Twenty years of compounding knowledge of exactly how the room works, what plays on camera, and how to make a network look exceptional in one of the most scrutinised broadcasts of the year.
Production design for a Showtime talk show produced by the creators of The Daily Show, a project that demanded wit, political intelligence, and visual sophistication in equal measure.
Production design for California Live, the live daily talk show on KNBC Los Angeles, alongside live broadcast environments at Santa Monica, the Universal Studios backlot, the NBC News Brokaw Center, and a studio built within the offices of People Magazine.
Design of a complete broadcast news facility for beIN Sports, from studio environments through on-air graphics and presentation. A broadcast world designed from the ground up at international sports news scale.
Set design for SNL cold opens, the most watched minutes of weekly American comedy. Built overnight, struck within hours, flawless on camera. The same precision as the grandest red carpet, compressed into hours.
Art direction across a run of reality formats — America's Next Top Model, If I Can Dream, Who Are You Wearing, Paris Hilton's My New BFF (including a rooftop pool party), and Adventures in Hollyhood set in Three 6 Mafia's Hollywood Hills house. Each one a different world. The same discipline underneath all of them.
Set design for the live season finale of Just Another Immigrant on HBO. A comedy series that built to a live culminating event — and needed a set that could hold that weight. Including the wall. The kind of production where the design is inseparable from the statement.
Art direction for BET including Don't Sleep with TJ Holmes — the late night talk show that brought a sharp political and cultural voice to BET's primetime — alongside multiple other original series.
Full-spectrum creative production for Formula 1 at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas: set and environment design, brand activation design, production design for broadcast coverage, VIP event experiences, opening ceremony design, flyover coordination, and entertainment programming during ceremonies. One of the most complex live event environments in sport, executed across every creative dimension simultaneously.
Creative and production design for the MTV Video Music Awards red carpet. Louder, bolder, more viscerally designed than any other awards show. The VMAs demand a different register. James delivered.
Production design for a live audience NBC show hosted by Nick Cannon at Universal CityWalk — transforming the entire outdoor entertainment complex into a nightclub. The kind of brief that requires thinking at urban scale: not a set within a space, but a space itself redesigned from the ground up, with a live audience inside it and cameras rolling.
Bespoke event design for private celebrations, intimate personal productions that demand the same creative attention and execution precision as any broadcast or live event, scaled to the most meaningful moments in a family's life.
On-location press event design for Amazon's RED ONE in Berlin, designed for Glass Engine. A fully experiential environment conceived from the ground up for the way press events actually function today: traditional media alongside influencer content creators, every angle a potential frame, every surface a potential post. Interactive elements, social-ready moments, and a spatial logic designed as much for a phone screen as a broadcast camera. Delivered internationally, on schedule, at the scale Amazon's biggest holiday tentpole demanded.
On-location experiential press event design for Universal's FAST X in Rome, designed for Glass Engine. Interactive moments, influencer-tuned activations, and environments designed to travel, built to perform in the room in Rome and simultaneously across every social platform covering the event.
On-location experiential press event design for Apple's F1 in New York, designed for Glass Engine. An environment that worked as a traditional press space, an influencer activation, and a social media moment simultaneously, under the scrutiny of a studio that considers design in everything it does.
Experiential press event environments designed for Glass Engine across four years of major studio releases, from franchise tentpoles to awards contenders, DreamWorks animation to prestige drama.
Art direction on Adventures of Serial Buddies, the indie black comedy directed by Keven Undergaro — a favour for friends that became a proper feature release starring Maria Menounos, Christopher Lloyd, Henry Winkler, and Beth Behrs before her 2 Broke Girls breakout. James said yes.
Immersive guest experience design for Universal Studios, physical environments where beloved television and film properties come to life at theme park scale.
Retail space and store environment design for Westfield at Los Angeles International Airport and Whole Foods, two of the most demanding retail contexts in America. LAX Westfield is one of the highest-footfall retail environments in the world. Both required visual thinking that serves commerce, brand, and customer experience simultaneously.
Interior design for the Access Hollywood offices across three locations — Burbank, Universal City, and 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. The working environments behind one of America's longest-running entertainment shows, designed to reflect the brand and serve the people making it every day.
Interior design for the private residences of entertainment industry producers and talent, warm eclectic spaces collected over time. The most personal application of design thinking, where the brief is someone's life.
Landscape design extending James's spatial practice into the outdoor environment. The same principles apply everywhere: space, light, texture, and story. The design doesn't stop at the threshold.
Landscape design extending James's spatial practice into the outdoor environment. The same principles apply everywhere: space, light, texture, and story. The design doesn't stop at the threshold.
Set design for MSNBC and NBC's live daily news programming, environments communicating authority, credibility, and visual clarity under the unforgiving conditions of live news broadcasting.
Overseeing studio set builds for Quibi, Rotten Tomatoes, and Snapchat at the frontier of short-form and digital streaming. Two Quibi productions were fully built when the platform collapsed. When COVID shut down studio production, James pivoted to designing at-home broadcast environments for Rotten Tomatoes talent, a discipline that became essential across the entire industry in 2020.
As Creative Director and Production Designer for NBC's Owned & Operated Television Stations digital and streaming division, James shaped the visual identity across NBC's national digital infrastructure, original streaming series, live streaming events, and digital brand content. Where broadcast ends and digital begins.
Art direction across commercial productions — a McDonald's Monopoly spot that aired during The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a Ford F-150 commercial, and award-winning automotive wrap art direction for a clothing brand at Men's Fashion Week. Apparel campaigns. The same eye, different briefs.
Twenty years across every format, scale, and category, now available to brands, agencies, festivals, and productions — on the Riviera, across Europe, and for US productions working internationally. US-trained. Permanently on the ground.
Immersive brand experiences for Cannes Film Festival, Cannes Lions, Monaco Grand Prix, and the Riviera's luxury event circuit. Designed to perform live and look extraordinary on camera.
End-to-end creative leadership for large-scale live events, opening ceremonies, galas, festivals, and corporate productions — from awards ceremonies and network broadcasts to Monaco activations and Cannes palais events. The vision and the execution, unified.
Production design and art direction for film, television, broadcast, and live performance. Environments that tell stories, at any scale, under any deadline, in any country.
On-the-ground production support for US and international film and television in the South of France. US-trained creative direction, deep local knowledge, established crew relationships. The gap between a US production and a European location, closed.
Creative eyes on the ground across the Côte d'Azur, Monaco, Cannes, Nice, Antibes and beyond. For US and international production designers, art directors, and studios who need someone who reads a location the way a designer does. Not just finding spaces, finding the right spaces, with an understanding of light, architecture, and what plays on camera.
Most creative directors speak one visual language. After twenty years across every format and category, James speaks all of them, and stays calm the whole time.
Questions first. Always. I ask until I understand your world, not just your brief.
Sketches, mood boards, references, the first unfiltered language of creative thinking.
3D renders, physical models, photorealistic visualisations, until the vision is undeniable.
The thing nobody mentioned in the brief. That one too.
On camera. On time. The show goes out. It always does.
The Riviera's creative season isn't a few weeks in May — and neither is James. Year-round on the ground in Nice. Not flying in from London or New York. The permanent local infrastructure for whoever arrives.
Whether you're a US studio with a press event in Europe, a global agency looking for a trusted Riviera creative partner, a brand planning a Cannes or Monaco activation, or a production needing US-standard creative direction on the ground in France — let's talk.
Before any of it, there was Disneyland.
I grew up in Southern California and as a teenager, had to work if I wanted to drive. Decided that I wanted to work in a place that I loved, so walked in cold one day to apply for a job. They put me in Attractions. They immediately made me into a Submarine Captain and Gondolier. The next summer someone noticed something and pulled me into Entertainment, working directly with the guests and logistics.
I worked the final season of the Electrical Parade. The inaugural season of Light Magic. I was there for Fantasmic. For the Festival of Fools.
Those were the people who taught me that the world can be made beautiful. That beauty is serious work. That an audience standing in front of a castle in Anaheim can, for an hour, believe they are somewhere magical, and that this belief matters.
I've never stopped believing that.
Life in Places →