I
Partner before you police
The useful version of HR is in the room when the work is being shaped. Compliance matters. It is not the whole profession.
Head of People & Culture
Amanda Levi
Two decades in human resources. An international design practice now. She builds the people systems that let serious work stay human.
STUDIOS Architecture · Washington, D.C.
- 20
- Years in HR
- 06
- Organizations
- 06
- Studios in the firm
- 02
- Continents in the practice
00 — About
A people leader who has changed industries without changing the standard.
Amanda Levi is based in Washington, D.C., and is Head of People & Culture at STUDIOS Architecture. The firm is an international design practice — studios in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, Toronto, and Paris — known for workplace, civic, and institutional work.
Before design, she spent nearly twenty years inside organizations that do not look like one another: Target, JPMorgan Chase, Aramark, TEGNA, Premion, and IQM. Retail floors, a global bank, hospitality at district and regional scale, broadcast and connected television, then advertising technology. The thread is not the industry. It is the job of making a workplace legible to the people inside it.
Public accounts of her senior roles describe the same intention: a robust HR roadmap for leadership, employees equipped to succeed, and a workplace safe enough for the work to be good. That is the personal brand. Not a slogan. A practice.
01 — Practice
Four kinds of work. One standard of care.
A seat beside the work
Her own profile puts it plainly: Head of People & Culture at STUDIOS Architecture, partnering with leaders. That is the through-line from strategic HR business partnering at TEGNA to the role she holds now. People advice that arrives after the decision is already a missed meeting.
02 — Path
From the floor to the firm.
Dates follow publicly listed experience. Premion and TEGNA overlap because they were one organization seen from two roles.
-
2026 — Present
Head of People & Culture
Leads people and culture for an international architecture and design firm. STUDIOS practices across the United States, Canada, and France — workplace, civic, institutional, and mixed-use work — and her charge is the partnership with leaders that keeps that practice coherent.
-
2024 — 2026
Head of Human Resources
Joined the advertising-technology company to build on a strong culture and give people the tools to deliver for clients. The role was a leadership-facing HR roadmap: hiring, care, and the operating rhythm of a growing DSP.
-
2019 — 2024
Head of Human Resources
Led human resources for Premion, the connected-TV advertising business within TEGNA. A people practice built inside a fast-moving media product, not beside it.
-
2018 — 2024
Strategic HR Business Partner
Partnered with leaders across a national broadcast and digital media company. The Premion leadership sat inside the same years — one career, two altitudes of the same organization.
-
2017 — 2018
Regional Human Resources Manager
Regional scope after three years as a district human resources manager. Hospitality and facilities work is multi-site by nature: the practice has to hold in many rooms at once.
-
2014 — 2017
District Human Resources Manager
Day-to-day people leadership across a district — hiring, employee relations, and the unglamorous consistency that frontline teams actually feel.
-
2010 — 2014
Human Resources Manager
People management inside a global financial institution, where process, judgment, and discretion have to live in the same conversation.
-
2006 — 2010
Human Resources Manager
Where the career starts: a high-volume retail environment, and the first years of learning that culture is what people experience on a Tuesday, not what a handbook says.
Education
Bowling Green State University
Bachelor’s degree · 2002 — 2006
Recognition
OnConferences Talent Acquisition Award
Finalist, 2026 — as she shared on her public profile.
03 — Studios
International, because the firm is.
Amanda’s current practice is not a single office. STUDIOS is a multi-city firm. People policy, hiring, and culture have to travel — across U.S. studios and across the border into Canada and France — without becoming generic.
-
Where Amanda is based. A capital studio with a long civic and workplace practice — and the home of the people brief.
-
A studio in a city that treats the workplace as a public subject. Culture here has to keep the pace of the work.
-
The firm’s founding city, in 1985, with early technology clients. The people practice sits beside a design culture that has always been entrepreneurial.
-
The West Coast studio. Same standard of care, a different room, a different rhythm.
-
Cross-border employment is part of the job. One firm, more than one labor reality.
-
A European studio. Language, custom, and employment practice shift. The care should not.
04 — Approach
How the work is actually done.
II
Make the roadmap usable
A people strategy that leadership cannot repeat is a document, not a practice. She has been hired, more than once, to build the version people can run.
III
Equip people, then get out of the way
Tools, clarity, and a workplace safe enough to do ambitious work. That is the whole promise — repeated from hospitality floors to design studios.
“Partnering with leaders” is the whole sentence she leads with.
The rest of a people practice — talent, culture, systems — is how that partnership becomes something a firm can feel. STUDIOS describes itself as collectively driven, curious, and serious about different perspectives. A head of people is there to make those words operational.
05 — Connect
A note, not a funnel.
Leave your name, email, phone, and a short note. It is sent to Amanda. Her address stays off this page, and nothing is stored on the site.