Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Giardinelli.
Hi Bryan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’ll keep it short and sweet; My name is Bryan Giardinelli. I’m a 36-year-old globetrotter, freelance creative director, brand strategist, college teacher, and unabashed Progressive. Based in beautiful Temecula, California, in addition to the creative roles I wear, I am also a motorcycle-based tour guide, where I zip guests around beautiful Wine Country in the sidecar of a Ural motorcycle!
With 15+ years of experience working across a spectrum of fields in the technical, film, and creative industries, my career has taken me from major motion pictures & web series sets, to educating thousands of college students, to winning a $1,000,000 contract on ABC’s Shark Tank, to becoming the Director of Photography for the historical Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential campaign.
I’m married to the love of my life, Savanna, and with her support and the support of our corgis Sybil & Jade, I am pursuing my goals of continuing to build on a wild jumping career that has presented me with opportunities that few people are as lucky to experience. I’m focusing all that I can on being the most useful piece of the engine of progress that I can be, and I am eager to get to use my breadth of perspectives and unique life experiences to make an impact on the communities I belong to.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
While some climb the success ladder with relative ease, my rise to success is continually evolving and has never been easy. A road of success is often paved with bricks of failures, and I am no exception to this. While I am 36 years old, my life began 21 years ago, on September 11th, 2001. In August of that year, I sustained a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) that put me into cardiac arrest, left me in a month-long coma, and essentially erased the first 15 years of my life. The first solid memory I have is from sitting in my ICU bed a few days after being lifted out of my induced coma, staring up at the television on the wall just as the second plane hit the World Trade Center tower. For me, that was day 1 of a rocky few decades.
The injury left me with permanent memory recall issues and a few neurological disabilities that took over a decade to overcome. The social and communicative challenges that I faced in the first few years left me with a depression that took over my life. Constantly arguing with my parents, doing horribly in school, and having no friends because of my social difficulties, I leaned into food for my dopamine clicks, and in the 6 years following my accident, I had ballooned up to 400 pounds and spent some time living in my truck in a campground. The one positive takeaway from this timespan was that my loneliness for IRL friends drew me to video games, which birthed my curiosity for design. My memory issues forced me to pick up my first digital camera, and both of these would later become integral parts of my life.
I’m not sure what clicked, but at some point, I became self-aware and decided I wanted to turn my life around, and so… I did. I somehow made it into art college in late 2006, which opened me up to a whole new world of social relationships with people from all over the country. Those new social relationships planted seeds that helped me see how my unhealthy eating habits would eventually become my demise without a change, and so I made drastic changes in life that helped me lose TWO HUNDRED POUNDS before I’d graduate college in 2010!
There have been a litany of bumps and potholes and hurdles in the years since, but between my TBI and my weight loss alone, I feel like I’ve proven that most can overcome the biggest challenges in life when they truly decide that is what they want for themselves.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
As a creative director, I created the brand identity for a company that won a million-dollar contract on ABC’s SharkTank, and as I mentioned previously, I started off using Photoshop before I picked up my first camera. Graphic design is what introduced me to the world of art; I’ve won awards, worked with incredible brands, and been granted a lot of fantastic opportunities that any other industry wouldn’t provide. I feel like I’m in the midst of a creative shift in life, though.
The past few years, I’ve leaned heavily into my photography, and I feel like I finally have found the path I wish to take for the rest of my career. While my breadth of knowledge & experience expands a wide horizon of skills in the creative field, I think I am finally leaning into the fact that I *AM* a Photographer, blessed with a brain injury that has allowed & forced me to capture the world in a different way. I am myself behind a camera, and when I am given the resources – or at least not held back from using my own – I am able to capture the world in a way that reminds me that this world is worth fighting for.
For some reason or another, I always find myself in the right place at the right time to capture *that* shot, and that’s allowed me to travel every corner of the United States, it’s allowed me to travel all over Europe, and it’s opened up a door to a world that is so much bigger than I ever imagined. Now I want to share those stories with the world that fills my frame.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
Of course! I went to college in San Diego for a piece of paper, but I didn’t really learn much that I hadn’t already taught myself through free resources & tutorials! I owe a lot of my talent to the early tutorials on FStoppers, Phlearn, PixImperfect, FilmRiot, and Video Copilot!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://breathenewwinds.com/lanternlight
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/breathenewwinds
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/breathenewwinds
- Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BreatheNewWinds
