Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria

Product Manager / Owner / UX Designer, Web Developer, Cultural Producer

About

About

Photo by Kristofer Johnson, Lumen Festival 2011, Staten Island

I build digital products for organizations that make culture, and I have spent twenty-five years on both sides of that sentence.

25
Years in arts, tech, and culture
450+
Artists supported through residency programs
300k
Applications a year on the Awards Portal I owned
3
Working languages, across three continents

I started in Montpellier, in art school. Before I finished the BFA I had a public art commission along the city tramway, a Grand Prix from the LVMH concours, and a habit of building the technical side of other people’s projects — live scores, sound installations, the first websites.

New York took the next twenty years. I was technical director at Flux Factory, then ran the international residency program at Location One, then co-founded Residency Unlimited and directed operations there for eight years: 450 artists, 250 public programs, half a million in annual revenue, and every website along the way. Arts non-profits are where you learn that the system, the budget, and the person using it are the same problem.

In 2019 I made the engineering formal at Flatiron School. Then five years as Manager of Web & Information Services at the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, product owner of the Scholastic Awards portal — 300,000 applications, 80,000 regional awards, and 3,000 national awards a year, plus the modernization of the system underneath it with a team of design and engineering vendors.

I now work from Mexico City on product strategy and web development, mostly migrating small organizations off expensive hosted stacks onto static, CI/CD-driven, open-source ones. The last one cut licensing costs by ninety percent.

What has not changed across any of it: I like translating complexity into something a team can actually act on, and I like being useful to the mission, not just the ticket.

Career

  1. Product Strategy Consultant / Web Developer

    Sunset Parking · Kingsbury, USA

  2. Web Developer

    tllester.info · Mexico City, MEX

  3. Manager, Web & Information Services

    Art & Writing Awards · New York City, USA

  4. Web Developer

    W.A.G.E. · New York City, USA

  5. Product Designer / Co-founder

    Rivet · New York City, USA

  6. Freelance

    Teleprompter Operator · National, USA

  7. Director of Operation / Co-founder

    Residency Unlimited · New York City, USA

  8. Assistant Director, International Residency Program

    Location One · New York City, USA

  9. Teleprompter Operator

    QTV Autocue · New York City, USA

  10. Technical Director

    Flux Factory · New York City, USA

  11. Musician / Designer

    AUM Associates · New York City, USA

  12. Print & Design Intern

    Artes de México · Mexico City, MEX

What I do

Product

  • Technical Product Owner
  • Product Management
  • Backlog Management
  • Agile Delivery
  • Stakeholder Discovery
  • Requirements & User Stories

Build

  • Full Stack Engineering
  • UI/UX & Print Design
  • Data Analysis
  • DevOps & CI/CD
  • Systems Migration

Lead

  • Operations Director
  • Co-founder
  • Cultural Producer
  • Grant Writer
  • Team Leadership
  • Cross-functional Collaboration

Tools of the trade

Product

  • GitHub
  • Notion
  • Jira
  • Trello
  • Plane
  • Figma
  • Adobe
  • Penpot
  • Ollama

Engineering

  • Node
  • React
  • NextJS
  • SSR/SSG
  • Gatsby
  • Hugo
  • Ruby
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PHP
  • WordPress
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Git
  • CI/CD Pipelines
  • RESTful APIs
  • Micro Services
  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • Netlify
  • Vercel
  • Linux
  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Raspberry Pi

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • MariaDB
  • MySQL
  • SQL Server
  • MongoDB
  • DynamoDB
  • Tableau
  • DBeaver
  • phpMyAdmin

Education

  • Software Engineering Program Certification

    Flatiron School · New York City, USA 2019

  • Bachelor of Fine Arts

    École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier · Montpellier, France 2000

Languages

  • English

    C1

  • Spanish

    C1

  • French

    C1

Service to the field