Joan An Beaudoin is an Amsterdam-based creative director, designer and artist.​ She likes simple ideas. Especially when they become real. It usually starts with people. How they behave. What they love. What they avoid. What they're obsessed with. What they dance to. What makes them laugh.What makes absolutely no sense.

Culture is never far behind. Music, fashion, art, rituals, bad taste, good stories, everyday life. From there, she looks for the story. The one idea that can hold a whole world together. Sometimes that world is an installation. Sometimes a festival experience, a piece of furniture, a campaign, a room full of flowers or something that doesn’t have a useful category yet.

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Since 2024, Joan has been Head of Creative at Playground / TWOFIFTYK, working across brand experiences, installations and festivals. She leads ideas from the first question to the moment people actually walk into them, keeping the story intact along the way. Recent work includes the Libresse Refresh Spot at Pinkpop, which made menstruation rather hard to miss by turning it into a festival landmark. For Museumkaart, she developed WE ARE ALL WORKS OF ART with artist Bas Kosters, moving from mirrored bus shelters into a fashion show and onto Amsterdam Pride. The Refresh Spot won Best Brand Activation at the European Festival Awards. In 2023, Joan was Jury President for Spatial Design at the Dutch Creativity Awards.

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Born in Zürich, Switzerland and raised in the Netherlands Joan studied Graphic Design and Fashion & Textile Design at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. Which might explain why she never really chose between image, object, material and space. She likes them better together. She started her career at Saatchi & Saatchi Amsterdam before joining Scotch & Soda, creating worlds around fashion through campaigns, sets, graphics, murals and physical spaces. Along the way, she built her own practice across design, illustration, art and spatial work.

Over the years, the work has ended up in some unlikely places. Fifty years of Nike footwear, told through one long timeline of shoeprints. An altar to house music for Our House, Amsterdam’s Electronic Music Museum. A furniture and homeware collection for Sissy-Boy built around her own prints and textiles. Eight interactive spaces for FloriWorld, where flowers stay in bloom regardless of what month it is. Her illustrated campaigns for Naïf and Fitzroy won two SAN Awards and an Esprix Award. And then there are the things nobody asked for. Like Pleur Op Bloemen, an anti-Valentine’s service delivering one dead flower and an unkind note to someone who probably had it coming. 

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Outside of work, Joan paints, travels and collects things in her head. Music. Interiors. Art. People. Colours. Objects. Conversations. Strange little details. They tend to find their way back into the work.