past, present.
Kevin Kollenda is a creative consultant, guide, and facilitator. Thirty years in fashion, entertainment, and emerging culture.
The arc begins in London, 1994, at CLM — representing some of the most respected creative talent in fashion. Then New York: Creative Director at Epic Records, album launches for Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, and the start of a creative partnership with Lady Gaga that reshaped how pop culture expressed itself online.
Then Two Hustlers, the award-winning new-media innovation lab he co-founded and led as CEO — Lady Gaga, Diesel, Uniqlo, MAC, LVMH, H&M, Mugler — campaigns built on a single conviction: audiences are no longer spectators. They’re participants.
Different rooms. Same practice. Find the best people. Give them room. Listen.
What connected all of it was never the campaigns. It was curiosity — about the technologies of connection and what they do to identity. Social media asked: who are you, in public? The work of the last seven years asks the older version of the same question.
For seven years he has facilitated ceremony and guided contemplative work — over fifteen hundred people, alongside trusted and experienced co-facilitators, through a Happening, the collective he co-leads. One-on-ones, couples, men’s groups, veterans, small gatherings. Increasingly, the founders and executives he spent years sitting beside.
The bridge is shorter than it looks. Psychedelic medicine and the contemplative traditions are ancient technologies — instruments for studying presence, consciousness, and what everyone in the room shares underneath the noise. Science and spirituality, it turns out, are cousins. He studies both.
Board member, Kageno — Rwanda and Kenya. Based between New York and Shelter Island.