Kate Smyres is an accomplished Creative Project Manager based out of Ventura, California. Her background is in eCommerce, edtech, and traditional publishing, with some seal and horse wrangling thrown in for good measure.

Kate began her career utilizing her detail orientation and organizational skills in Boston clearing permissions for Pearson Custom Publishing then at WGBH for various websites and PBS television shows. After moving to New York, she found herself helping HBO build its online footage licensing archive, learning the ins and outs of SEO best practices. Eventually she landed at Cambridge University Press, making textbooks and audio and video ancillaries for the ESL division. There, she learned how to develop the high standards of content quality the publisher is renowned for. Deciding she’d like to move home to California, she transitioned to edtech with Cengage Learning and went digital, managing the complex production of interactive textbooks. When the publisher closed its San Francisco office, she upped her skill set by shifting into eCommerce and people management for partycity.com, where she oversaw the production process for roughly 84,000 product images and 63,000 product descriptions.

Now that Party City has liquidated, Kate is looking for her next role at an innovative company in the SaaS, healthcare, biotech, fintech, or edtech sectors, and is looking to expand on her AI skills that were acquired at the retailer. In this down time between roles, she is taking online courses and following various AI-centric podcasts to learn about this continuously evolving technology.

In her other life, Kate devotes her time volunteering for various causes. She’s been caring for marine mammals for 10 years at two different rescues, and at a horse sanctuary for the past three. In 2022, she was lucky enough to participate in a Magellanic penguin field study in Patagonia (Argentina) for a week. Other volunteering experience includes being a member of her local Community Emergency Response Team to aid first responders in the event of an emergency, being HAZWOPER certified to help rescue animals in the event of an oil spill off the coast, and tutoring a 4th grader in reading during Covid.