Advertising

Education

• M.F.A., Virginia Commonwealth University
• B.A., University of Virginia

Background

• Associate Professor, Design & Creative Advertising
• CreateAthon@VCU Founder & Director
• Pro Bono Advocate

Peyton Rowe thrives on using her superpowers of design and creative thinking to help her students learn how to produce powerful work for clients and their local community. She has taught at the college level for over 20 years and continues to learn each year how to do it better. Rowe has taught design, art direction and campaigns as well as capstone leadership courses. The common theme of her classes and work is social design and how to use communication skills to serve the community. And she can spot an unkerned word in a heartbeat.

Through her work as Executive Director of CreateAthon and Founder of CreateAthon@VCU, Rowe has focused her energy on inspiring, motivating and teaching as many creative groups as possible how their advertising and marketing talents can serve their local nonprofits. At VCU alone, Rowe has mobilized 847 volunteers to serve 103 Richmond nonprofits with over $1.9 million in pro bono marketing work in the past ten years. Pro bono service is the social change tool that has been a quiet partner in key social movements and will be critical in nonprofit capacity growth in the next 20 years.