ABOUT
Danika Underhill is an award-winning freelance Creative Director who specializes in visual storytelling across commercial, editorial, and new branding ventures.
Top photo, with Miles Chamley-Watson, by Vincent Dilio. Above, with a Ducati, by Paola Kudacki.
Danika Underhill (rhymes with Monica) grew up in a Southern California that doesn't quite exist anymore — wide open spaces, oil derricks, and orange groves, before the tract homes and golf courses moved in. She learned photography from her father, composing through the viewfinder of his Hasselblad and Rolleiflex cameras, upside down and backwards. That early, unhurried relationship with images never left her. After earning a film degree in San Francisco, she made her way to New York, where she's spent the last twenty-plus years at the intersection of Photo Art Direction and Graphic Design.
She's guided complex projects for various clients across still life, on-figure, editorial, print, and digital, and on location in countries she's lost count of. Her work moves fluidly between Art Direction and Design: developing concepts, building mood boards, directing on set, and shaping how a campaign looks and feels across every surface.
She's opened Vogue to a double page spread of her work, watched her images wrap buildings and buses across multiple cities, zipped by her billboards on the endless freeways of California, and rode the subway home from the studio with an ad buyout overhead, her own work staring back at her. Countless wild postings have papered the walls of New York City. She co-produced a feature film for which she designed both the fictional magazine at the heart of the story and the opening credit sequence — and yes, there's a cameo. Her work has been recognized in Lürzer's Archive and earned two Telly Awards. She even encountered one of her subway ads covered in graffiti, scribbled notes, and jokes, which she considers a compliment.
Danika has a way of making complex projects feel manageable — not by simplifying them, but by bringing the kind of calm, focused eye that cuts through to what actually matters. She reads between the lines of a brief, notices what others miss, and has a knack for making sure everyone knows exactly where they're headed. If that sounds like what your next project needs, she's based in New York and always curious about what you're building.
Say hi —> d.underhill@gmail.com
She's guided complex projects for various clients across still life, on-figure, editorial, print, and digital, and on location in countries she's lost count of. Her work moves fluidly between Art Direction and Design: developing concepts, building mood boards, directing on set, and shaping how a campaign looks and feels across every surface.
She's opened Vogue to a double page spread of her work, watched her images wrap buildings and buses across multiple cities, zipped by her billboards on the endless freeways of California, and rode the subway home from the studio with an ad buyout overhead, her own work staring back at her. Countless wild postings have papered the walls of New York City. She co-produced a feature film for which she designed both the fictional magazine at the heart of the story and the opening credit sequence — and yes, there's a cameo. Her work has been recognized in Lürzer's Archive and earned two Telly Awards. She even encountered one of her subway ads covered in graffiti, scribbled notes, and jokes, which she considers a compliment.
Danika has a way of making complex projects feel manageable — not by simplifying them, but by bringing the kind of calm, focused eye that cuts through to what actually matters. She reads between the lines of a brief, notices what others miss, and has a knack for making sure everyone knows exactly where they're headed. If that sounds like what your next project needs, she's based in New York and always curious about what you're building.
Say hi —> d.underhill@gmail.com
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