Speaker Profile

Candace Sautman, a St. Louis native, attended the University of Missouri’s Journalism School thinking she’d become the next ‘Oprah.’ However, she quickly realized being in front of the camera wasn’t for her and being behind the scenes is where she felt most confident and most capable of telling a damn good story.  Moving to NYC days after her college graduation she knew she wanted to pursue story telling full time, but as with most things it didn’t pan out as expected. She’s had a very diverse career background, and has found herself telling stories through videos, photos and events, not your typical pen to paper ideal she originally had in mind. Creating these narratives through other creative means came as a welcomed challenged.

Now, Candace finds herself creating stories for brands through social and digital content strategy development and creative production. Currently, she is the Senior Director of Strategy at Laundry Service, part of Wasserman Media Group. She currently serves the Facebook and Amazon Prime Video accounts, focusing on a lot of the agencies entertainment and tech business. She’s previously had the pleasure of creative directing, project managing and producing for multicultural agency, Translation, and for other brands like NBA, Refinery29, Complex Networks, Milk Makeup, Paper Magazine, among others.

She prides herself in being a connector, an ideas woman and a problem solver and more importantly, in helping to make space for the next wave of Black creatives and thinkers. Knowing this, she feels there’s hope for the future of advertising and who knows, Oprah may have a successor on the way, and she goes by Candace ;)