Interactive Media & Technology | Spatial Storytelling | Environmental Design | Production Design | Visual Narrative | AR & XR Development |
Brand Experience | Creative Direction | Team Leadership | Video Production | Set Design | Motion Design | Photography
Brand Experience | Creative Direction | Team Leadership | Video Production | Set Design | Motion Design | Photography
Hardcore Creative is Suzanne Heintz
A Creative Director with 20+ years leading brand visual identity, production design, and content strategy for major brands including Peloton, ESPN, CNN, STARZ, and NBCU. The practice specializes in one thing: brand work that lives in a room, not on a screen.
Brand experience work — activations, installations, immersive environments — requires four capabilities in one head: set and environment design, brand narrative, motion and video content, and an interactive layer that makes the space respond. Most senior creatives in this space bring two or three. Hardcore Creative brings all four, backed by a fresh Master's from NYU's ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) in interactive design and physical computing.
What Hardcore Creative does:
Concept, creative direction, and design for brand activations, immersive brand environments, interactive installations, experiential retail, and cultural/museum work. Full ownership from strategy to install, or targeted collaboration inside larger agency and production teams. Fluent in set, motion, brand, and interactive tech — which means the concept, the environment, the content, and the responsive layer all come from the same head, and nothing gets lost between disciplines.
Suzanne's track record:
Six immersive production studios built end-to-end for Peloton as Senior Director of Global Production Design. A rebrand across twelve channels at STARZ. Creative and art direction for over 3,000 hours of branded content at Craftsy/NBCU, scaled through a 500% increase in production output. And now Sheeple's Court — an award-winning immersive interactive installation featured at NYU ITP Spring Show 2026, where visitors walk through a corridor of motion-tracked digital sheep that judge them in real time.
Alongside the professional practice, Suzanne is a photographer and filmmaker whose long-running Mannequin series earned global press and a feature documentary streaming on Amazon Prime — cultural credibility that informs how she approaches brand work: unconventional ideas, arresting aesthetics, real substance underneath.
How Hardcore Creative works:
Direct client relationships or agency subcontract. Concept through install. Team of one, network of collaborators across fabrication, projection, sound design, and physical computing when scale requires it. Based in New York.