Black Profiles in Creativity: Oriel Davis-Lyons Creates The One School

Throughout Black History Month, we’re partnering with agency owner Derek Walker on a series that highlights the ideas, perspectives and successes of Black advertising professionals. Today we’re featuring Oriel Davis-Lyons, creative director at Spotify. Davis-Lyons is the founder of The One School, a free, 16-week portfolio school for Black creatives that he runs in partnership with The One Club for Creativity. The school, which is currently virtual, offers courses in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Students can apply to whichever program best fits their time zone. Read why The One School is important to him and how it came to be. Derek Walker: Why are you proudest of this work? Oriel Davis-Lyons: The work I’m most proud of is One School, the first online portfolio school for Black creatives that I started with the support of The One Club in July 2020. Almost every ad I’ve ever made has been forgotten. That’s just the nature of what we do. Even our best work is ephemeral. So for me, creating something that will outlast me and continue to change the industry long after I leave it is something I’ll be proud to tell my kids when they’re old enough to understand what I do. I’m also proud of it because of how Black it is. As senior Black creatives, so much of our success has been dependent on how well we can fit into rooms full of people who don’t look like us, talk like us or think like us. W. E. B. DuBois called it “Double consciousness,” where we as Black people are always looking at ourselves through a lens that is not our own and that we have no control over. The school is different.We’re teaching advertising through a Black lens. We are deliberately finding ways to use our unique experience to make the work better. We are teaching students not to fit into white corporate culture, but to stand out for their Blackness and the value that brings. The proudest moment was at our graduation. Despite it being virtual, we were close. Students spoke of the school like finding a new family. To think that we’ve been able to help young Black creatives develop bonds that will last their whole careers is special. Would you change anything about this work? I wish it hadn’t started life as an emergency response. Almost overnight the industry was faced with an issue that had been kicked down the road for a long time. How can there be so many Black celebrities, Black music, Black language and Black culture in our work, but so few Black creatives involved in making it. So, we got the school off the ground in about a month because it felt like there was a sudden urgent demand for solutions. That meant a lot of really, really long days. So I guess that would be the change I’d make. How did you get here with this idea? I, like so many Black people last summer, was struggling with how to continue functioning in corporate America while feeling like I wanted to drop everything and be a full-time revolutionary. I wanted to find a way to bring that spirit of activism into my work life. I’d done a similar course [to One School] 10 years ago in New Zealand. And the best thing about it was that it wasn’t some general introduction to advertising. It was like, “You’ve got 12 weeks to get a portfolio together so buckle up.” So, coming here and realizing there was nothing that simple or affordable, I thought, “Well, I know this works, and I think I can figure out how to repeat it.”