About

Josh Brill is a multidisciplinary creative director, designer, and artist from Portland, Maine.

He began wanting to create comics during his high school years in the early 1990s. In 1995, Josh enrolled at the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Animation in New Jersey, one of the few schools of its kind in the world. The experience opened his eyes to a wider world of art and design, and the desire to explore it further led him back to Maine. He left to find the next level as an artist.

Back in Maine, Josh enrolled at Maine College of Art, excelling in painting, sculpture, photography, and graphic design. Department heads were trying to recruit him, but the Design chair pointed out that he could work across all disciplines and earn a living. That convinced him to major in graphic design.

It was not until he discovered Flash and the artists who were inventing the art form that everything fell into place. His professor George LaRou was one of those artists who pushed him to bring it all together. Every Flash piece became a new take on narrative fine art, mixing everything Josh had learned at Kubert and MECA into this new media art era, a new cultural art form that he could help shape in its formation. The potential felt infinite. It was exactly the kind of open creative territory he needed.

After graduating in 2000, Josh spent a decade as an interactive art director and motion designer, building Flash websites, microsites, games, and motion graphics for brands, agencies, and artists. In 2005, he won the May 1st Reboot, a global design contest, with the Specimen Series, an interactive experiential site exploring the surreal world of his Specimen paintings.

When Flash died with the rise of the iPhone, the interactive industry moved toward conservative utility over narrative driven interactivity. When the economy collapsed in 2008, Lumadessa was created out of that uncertainty with its first art print collection, Flora Fauna. Creative blogs took notice and began reporting on the work, opening the door to brand collaborations with Lacoste, Element Skateboards, and Habitat. It opened into a new creative career with brands, deepening Josh's craft across illustration, branding, product design, and art direction.

Now, with the world of interactivity returning to expressive narratives with the help of new tools like Rive and Spline, he is on his way back to find that next level.