Claudia Donaldson is an editor, creative director and visual strategist working predominantly in print, film and digital media. She has authored precedent-setting, award-winning projects that have continually centered on broadening the stories and definitions of exemplary creativity made in the context of major cultural, technological and social change.  Her capacities for leading innovation and collaboration is manifest in her multiform work – often at a point of organizational renewal - with global brands, creative agencies, artists, and cultural institutions worldwide. The hallmark of her creative practice is to uniquely cross-pollinate the traditionally separated narratives of fashion, art, design and beauty. With her recognisable conceptual rigour and distinctive aesthetic, her commitment to the future of creative endeavour beyond the status quo of historical frames is consistently present. 

As photography director of WALLPAPER*, Claudia’s tenure can be characterised as the instigation of a radical change in the aesthetic and tonality of the magazine. She gave new, non-prescriptive, and relevant visual direction to the magazine and a greater editorial openness that centered on making WALLPAPER* a publication of relevance and relatable for new readers. She developed a new editorial approach that took eminent and emerging artists and independent photographers out of their natural working environment and commissioned them to enter into the editorial space in unexpected and playful ways. Under Claudia’s direction, the new roster created outstanding and vital editorial image-making and grew to include leading photographers and artists including Hedi Slimane, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld, Andreas Gursky, Larry Sultan, Viviane Sassen, and Jim Goldberg. 

While editor-in-chief at NOWNESS, Claudia created a front-running editorial programme of flagship series and episodic video strands at the creative start of fashion and lifestyle digital publishing. She developed nine content categories for NOWNESS, making it the foremost channel in reaching an audience otherwise inaccessible via traditional media. Originally a fashion blog owned by LVMH, NOWNESS was relaunched as a video channel under her editorship, becoming a digital platform rooted in design and creative culture. “In Residence”, the award-winning design series she created exclusively for the platform, has subsequently been described as the most influential design format in video and is NOWNESS’s most successful episodic video series. The launch of beauty series “Define Beauty” broke the site’s record audience figure, trebling it in five weeks to reach 1 million views. In addition, she built numerous series for the channel - “The Producers”, “Shorts on Sundays”, “A Woman’s Work”, “My Apartmento” and “Getting There” - that were highly predictive of the scope of storytelling within the fields of fashion, luxury, art and design and the creative journeys that define its momentum.

In 2019, Claudia launched her ongoing project, CLOAKROOM, that draws together different editorial, curatorial and pedagogical strategies to manifest the broad and positive power of design. Starting as a biannual print magazine and digital platform, the project synthesizes her interests in cinema, music, fashion, art and design and is consciously driven by the desire to create space to honor, appreciate and inspire hyper-personal creative journeys. Contributors to CLOAKROOM have spanned across legacy creators and thinkers and culture-redefining new talent including Lynda Benglis, Harrison Ford, Micheal Ward, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Jia Tolentino, Marcelino Sambé, Leïla Slimani, Fatima al Qadiri, Duane Michals and Ed Ruscha.