Fahad Ahmed
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Tony Strader is a Cincinnati creative leader in video, web design, and UI/UX, and the editor of the short film The Angle, whose path runs from teaching at-risk kids to build websites to award-winning storytelling. A maker who still cannot stop building, on screen or off.
Tony Strader has spent 15 years moving between the camera, the timeline, and the code. The thread that holds it together is older than any of it: someone learning to make something they could not make before.
Before the awards, before the brand films and the redesigns, Tony Strader was in a room teaching technology to kids who had been counted out. He calls it the thing that set everything else in motion. "My approach to creative direction is deeply rooted in mentorship," he says, a value he says he "solidified early in my career teaching technology to at-risk youth." Most people describe their craft by listing what they can do. Strader describes his by pointing at who he was trying to reach.
The work that does not stay in one lane
Strader is hard to file under a single title, and that seems to be the point. He shoots video. He edits. He designs websites and the experiences inside them. He photographs wildlife. He describes himself as "an award-winning creative leader specializing in the end-to-end management of digital media," and the "end-to-end" is the tell: he tends to follow a project from the first idea to the last pixel rather than hand it off halfway.
Most of that work has happened around Greater Cincinnati. For Great Parks of Hamilton County he has built website redesigns, an action video, a video series, and overview films. For Miami University he has cut promotional and testimonial pieces, including the Miami Online promo and a run of testimonial videos in 2023. Along the way he has collected the kind of trade hardware that piles up over a long run behind the camera and the keyboard: Telly, Viddy, and MarCom awards, an Ohio Magazine Ruby for the Great Parks site, a national parks-and-recreation video finalist nod.
The life around the work
The portrait does not end when he closes the laptop. "When I'm not driving digital strategy," he says, "I'm playing guitar in my band, recording bands in my studio, practicing judo, or building computers." It is a revealing list. Every item on it is someone making something with their hands and their attention, which is the same thing his day job asks of him. The mentor who taught kids to build a website grew into a person who still cannot stop building: a track, a mat habit, a machine from parts.
Still building
The story Strader tells about himself keeps returning to the same place. Not a credit, not an award, but a room where someone learns to make a thing they could not make before, and the patience it takes to get them there. The films and the sites are what that looks like fifteen years on. The next one is, presumably, already in pieces on a bench somewhere, waiting to be put together.
About
Tony Strader is an award-winning creative leader specializing in video, web design, UI/UX, and photography, based in the Greater Cincinnati area. He has led digital and video projects for Miami University and Great Parks of Hamilton County, founded his own multimedia business, and edited the 2023 short film The Angle. He holds a certification in Leadership Essentials. Find him at tonystrader.com, on Instagram @wobbey, and on LinkedIn.