With over 20 years of professional experience, Asa is a multidisciplinary design, planning, and communications strategist who integrates human-centered storytelling with place-based urban design, planning, and community engagement. Asa helps organizations and communities translate their vision into visually stunning, heartfelt, and emotionally powerful stories that inspire, connect, and move people to action.
A two-time National News Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist with ABC News in NYC, Asa is now filming and producing new projects, dialing-up his business and contracting. Reach out and make contact to talk more! From 2020 to 2025, Asa led project-based storytelling, strategic communications, and marketing at Renaissance Planning, an urban planning and design consulting firm. As Director of Strategic Design & Communications and Storytelling Practice Lead, Asa honed his one-man-band style of story and video production to advance client goals, improve the community engagement phase, and help many communities understand complex planning initiatives.
Asa filmed and produced dozens of successful community-based video and storytelling content for a range of communities and public agencies from the mid-Atlantic to Florida. These included documentary-style Community Vision Videos, public engagement films, animated Explainer Videos, site tour/drone videos, and ArcGIS StoryMaps. Each is created to inspire action and foster inclusive public engagement. Recent examples are on the Storytelling & Video page of this website.
From 2018 to 2020, Asa enjoyed working with VMDO Architects in Charlottesville, VA, where he led in-house video production, visual storytelling, and managed proposal development as a hybrid communications and marketing strategist. After UVA’s Graduate School of Architecture (2011-2014), Asa directed the documentary film Landscapes of Longevity, which premiered at the 2014 Virginia Film Festival. More about this feature-length film is on the Landscapes of Longevity page.
Thriving Cities at UVA
For two years, Asa worked with Thriving Cities, a cross-disciplinary group of sociologists and urban researchers, leading multimedia storytelling, product development, and design-research strategies. Asa was also the Creative Director at its parent institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA.
Past Projects/Portfolio
Before moving to Charlottesville in 2011 to pursue his master’s degree at UVA, Asa was a broadcast journalist and investigative producer at ABC News in New York for eight years. From professional news production to urban design and landscape architecture to professional work in community-based storytelling and video production, the selected examples on this website illuminate the wide range of skills and passion Asa carries for storytelling, research, and design work.
New Projects & Collaboration
Asa is always open to new projects, especially involving community storytelling, filmmaking, urban design, community engagement, aerial videography, creative placemaking, landscape architecture, or even kids, sports, electric bikes, and backyard chickens. Reach out to discuss ideas for your next project!
“Ace Creative” – Since 1980
Contact Me
asaeslocker@gmail.com
c: 917-279-7599