2013 Commencement Celebration
Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design Commencement Celebration
2:00 pm, Saturday, May 4
Art and Architecture Building, 2nd floor courtyard
2000 Bonisteel Blvd, Ann Arbor
The 2013 Stamps School commencement speaker is Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of Citia.
Linda Holliday is a Detroit native, a Stamps School graduate (BFA ‘79) and a media, internet and marketing serial-entrepreneur. She credits her capacity to “work outside the box,” in part, to her education at the Stamps School of Art & design. “My industrial design courses taught me how to organize problems and solve them creatively,” says Holliday. “And thanks to the color classes I’ve never stopped seeing differently.”
Holliday also affirms the benefits of learning within a university context. “After 30 years as a professional, I’m so grateful for my well-rounded, world-class university education. Art college graduates just don’t have access to the same academic depth and breadth — or the infinitely diverse interpersonal experiences.”
After graduating from UM and getting her MBA from the Wharton School, Holliday’s career path focused on innovation in new industries where creativity and entrepreneurial thinking were essential, including her role as founder of Medical Broadcasting Company, now Digitas Health, a Publicis Company.
Recognizing patterns and cross fertilizing – one business to another, one relationship to another – is key. “Creative people aren’t afraid to take creativity to everything they do.”
Linda’s current engagements demonstrate this breadth. She is founder/CEO of Citia, a software start-up that has created an immersive, modular, 3D media platform for the new content creators: musicians, writers, artists, cross-media innovators. Citia has worked with partners as diverse as Penguin and Snoop Dogg and has been featured in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg and others. Linda is also a long-time TEDster, she teaches entrepreneurship to the masters students at The School of Visual Arts, and is a digital media advisor and angel investor with the New York Angels.
She now lives with her husband, Ali Naqvi, in New York.
Read a 2010 essay by Linda Holliday, Making the Case for Creative Thinking, on PLAY.