On finding a footing

(Co-Op)

A co-op of gifted and generous minds operating within and adjacent to the cultural sector, The Pioneers stewards aspects of the collective's digital presence, overseeing strategic communications, marketing, and media production across web, email, and social platforms, to articulate and amplify a collective vision. Functioning within the fluid conditions of a landscape where visibility moves faster than traditional structures can hold, the Co-Op translates that agility into deliberate, periodic signals that build meaning over time. The work is less about managing static channels and more about shaping an evolving ecosystem in which narrative, platform, and strategy operate as a single, generative system.

People
Saul Appelbaum
Director

Saul Appelbaum is an artist, curator, media director, producer, and digital strategist in the arts and culture sector. His practice combines storytelling, design, architectonic thought, and media to amplify cultural narratives and experiment with new infrastructures for collaboration. He is committed to the ability of participatory media and art to reshape how audiences experience culture across disciplines, fostering engagement that is both intellectual and emotional.

Appelbaum is the Founding Director of The Pioneers, a media production company and “co-op of gifted and generous minds” that champions Agile Cinema®, an agile, hybrid mode of media creation spanning fiction, non-fiction, scripted, and unscripted formats. Through The Pioneers he has overseen projects such as Narrative Fieldwork on the Curator platform for The Broad Museum, Serpentine Galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Petzel Gallery—works reflecting his commitment to experimentation and multichannel cultural storytelling.

In addition, Appelbaum serves as Media Director at Dreaming in Public, Rusha & Co., Curator, and ENSO Law. These roles demonstrate his capacity to move fluidly between curatorial, editorial, and strategic practices, building platforms that connect artists, businesses, and institutions to global audiences.

His collaborations include Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, InStyle, L’Officiel, Grazia, Numéro, Critical Inquiry, Hirmer Verlag, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of the African Diaspora, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Kunstmuseum Bern, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Singapore Art Museum, Atlanta Art Fair, TRANSFER Gallery, The Jewish Federation, Perry Ellis, ASICS, Kids of Immigrants, The Visionaries Agency, TCAmgmt, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, FGP Atelier, Rocco Castoro’s SCNR, and Nato Thompson’s The Alternative Art School.

He has also worked with artists and cultural figures including Tony Cragg, Ann Hamilton, Pope.L, Mick Jenkins, Snoop Dogg, Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios, Heidi Klum, Diego Boneta, Natalia Reyes, and Zión Moreno.

Appelbaum holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Chicago. He is based in Los Angeles and travels globally for work.
Elodie Goldberg Jacquemain
Assistant Director

Elodie is a Los Angeles-based designer, coder, and researcher whose practice weaves together open-source software, critical theory, and the poetics of translation. Trained in design numérique, Elodie’s work inhabits the space where code and language meet, interrogating how design is not only a technical or aesthetic discipline, but a linguistic and political act.

At the heart of Elodie’s research is translation in its broadest sense: not just the movement between languages, but the transformation of ideas and struggles rooted in decolonial, queer, and anti-racist contexts. She asks what it means to translate newly theorized concepts, often born in Anglo-Saxon academic traditions, into a French or Francophone semantic and political imaginary, and whether translation can itself be a site of generative resistance.

Her creative output manifests as digital experiences that are as legible as they are useful: tools, websites, and interactive interfaces that expose their own architecture, making visible the very scaffolding that shapes how we read, think, and act. In doing so, Elodie invites her audiences into a conversation, not just with her work, but with the systems, linguistic, technological, social, that underpin it.

Committed to openness, Elodie shares much of her process through GitLab and other open-source platforms. Her projects are simultaneously archives, experiments, and provocations: each one seeks to cultivate not passive users, but collaborators in the ongoing task of meaning-making.

Elodie’s design practice is deeply situated in questions of power, access, and identity, particularly as they emerge in marginalized or emerging semantic spaces. By foregrounding translation and legibility, she grounds her work in both theory and praxis: designing not just for the present, but toward possible futures where language, code, and politics are intertwined and mutable.
Strategy
Research and development of multimedia, multivoice, and multichannel strategies and tactics for marketing and communications
Branding
Lead creative teams to produce poignant, powerful, and sometimes provocative digital media for brands, campaigns, and daily content across web, email, social, and apps.
Management
Web, email, and social media management and ongoing creative and intellectual labor for partners with strong aesthetic and cultural overlaps with The Pioneers
Consulting
Guidance for crafting a vibrant, cohesive, and relevant digital presence coupled with business operations and a cross-platform distribution plan
Publishing
Regular contributor to established serial publications and publisher of an E-zine reaching 70k+ readers across art, fashion, beauty, film, music, architecture, literature, design, and advertising.

Inner worlds, shared in "public solitude" –Stanislavski

(Character Outline)

The Co‑Op’s members bring together interdisciplinary practices, integrating imaginative, aspirational, and fantastical thinking into the way we produce, plan, and communicate, using playful or speculative screenwriting forms that often foreshadow projects which later manifest as real or non‑fiction outcomes.