Creative Lead, Artist Operations

We’re looking for a designer-turned-operator to find extraordinary artists around the world, win their trust, and turn their creative worlds into VAWAA experiences people will travel for.

Someone with a trained eye for design and craft, strong relationship instincts, and the commercial instinct to know which artists and experiences will resonate — and the drive to get them onboarded and launched.

We are building VAWAA. The platform for human creativity in an AI world.

It’s a global platform where people travel to learn directly from master artists in their studios for multi-day apprenticeships, stepping into the real rhythm of their practice and leaving changed. We are defining a new category at the intersection of travel, creativity, learning, culture, and transformation.

VAWAA artists are extraordinary ceramicists, painters, weavers, chefs, sculptors, shoemakers, woodworkers, designers, and Indigenous makers around the world.

Our guests are curious humans who want to make something with their hands, learn from someone extraordinary, and experience a place through its creative culture.

95% of our guests describe their experience as life-changing. 98% of the VAWAA artists have stayed on the platform. People come to us when they want something more meaningful than another vacation.

Demand is outpacing supply. On the other hand, we have 1,200 artists on the waitlist. Our team is small (just
5) and we’re just trying to keep up with the demand. We’ve built a really good product. Our founder built VAWAA after two decades in design and tech, and a life built around learning and traveling across 65+ countries. Our angel investors are great too, and repeat VAWAA guests.

We continuously improve the experience through feedback from guests and artists after every VAWAA. We observe, track and learn from guests and artists daily.

We build and optimize systems, workflows, and templates so we can operate with speed and clarity. We believe delivering a great experience consistently requires a very organized backstage.

A beautiful, 10-star experience depends on 57 tiny details not falling through the cracks.

If you’ve played the startup game before, you know that nothing in life is certain. That said, we have strong fundamentals, we believe our mission for human creativity is meeting the moment, and our business is working.

We are now growing our artist community across art forms, cultures and geographies.

We’re looking for a Creative Lead, Artist Experiences, Growth & Operations to own the growth of VAWAA’s artist supply—from identifying exceptional artists to building the relationship, shaping their VAWAA and getting them successfully launched.

This is not a traditional recruiting, sales, curation, editorial or operations role. It combines elements of all five.

You’ll need enough creative judgment to recognize what makes an artist exceptional, enough curiosity to uncover what isn’t obvious from an application, enough commercial instinct to shape an experience people will travel for, and enough operational discipline to move dozens of artists through a complex process without losing the human relationship.
Our immediate goal is to build the systems and pipeline to launch approximately 20-30 exceptional artists over four months , without compromising the quality bar that makes VAWAA distinctive.

The role will begin as a 3–4 month consulting engagement. During this period, you’ll take ownership of a priority artist pipeline while helping us build and improve the systems for curation, onboarding and launch.

You’ll initially own the artist journey end-to-end. As we grow, we’ll add specialist support around you. Your role is both to do the work and help build the systems that allow it to scale.

This is a…