I’m Mike McNally-Costello, professional creative. Specifically: a strategic creative director, writer, songwriter, artist, and maker of things that tend to start in one form and end up in another.
Across this site, you’ll find my professional work portfolio, original artwork, original music, and original writing. Different rooms, same house.
The brass tacks: we all have bills to pay, and I pay mine by collecting paychecks as a director-level healthcare marketing and communications writer. I have 20+ years of experience in positioning, storytelling, and award-winning omnichannel campaign development. I’ve worked with startups, global enterprises, and plenty of strange beasts in between. I’ve led teams, shaped brand voices, built campaign platforms, pitched the room, won the work, and helped turn complicated ideas into something people can feel, remember, and act on.
Beyond the brief, art-wise, I make multimedia portraits that combine graffiti-style stencil and spray paint with collaged text and freehand painted images. The portraits include some of my beloved personal faves, including Wanda Coleman, Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, and Frank O’Hara.
Beyond the brief, writing-wise, I scribble poems, essays, song lyrics, strange little theories, and fill notebooks with the unclassifiable rest. My poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, and numerous journals and literary magazines. Much of my creative work circles return, rupture, grief, identity, and transformation, often through wit, humor, emotion, associative thinking, and fractal-based creative approaches: the weird ways one image, sound, or idea mutates into another.
That impulse led me to create Strange Returns, a project about the fractal behavior of creativity and how creative work comes alive by looping back and leaping sideways. It explores poetry, music, visual art, recursive return, and associative thinking through a fractal lens, looking at the nonlinear ways art teaches us how to make more art. You can dive, cannonball, or cautiously step into it here: https://ladidali.substack.com/
Beyond the brief, music-wise, I’m also writing and producing indie rock songs with punk-pop energy, self-aware wit, and grounded surreal lyricism. My latest project, All In to Get Out, is an EP’s worth of original songs that sits somewhere in orbit with Pixies, Blondie, and The Jim Carroll Band. Earworms abound. I have demos, polished digital versions, and stems built using music software, so they’re not “band in a room” recordings yet, but the songs, hooks, arrangements, and production ideas are all there. I’m looking for musicians, singers, producers, and/or bands who can help bring them fully to life.
Frank O’Hara wrote the line “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” Jack London said you can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. These are commandments I hold in my mind and heart.
I also practice mindfulness and compassion, believe headlines are poetry with a purpose, think Santa Clarita Diet deserved more seasons, and used to sing my son to sleep with an original lullaby that quietly borrowed the tune of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.”
But I digress. I know you have portfolios to peruse.
Enjoy. And reach out if anything in here sparks anything in you.
I look forward to it.
email mcwrite@me.com or visit www.linkedin.com/in/highfivemichaelcostello/