How Black Math Learned To Start With Art And Why Curiosity Not Speed Is The Point

Creative Boom: Insight Creative Industry How Black Math learned to start with art – and why curiosity, not speed, is the point Co-founder Jeremy Sahlman on building a studio from a chance meeting on a Boston street, chasing ideas nobody asked for, and why taste is the one thing the new tools can't fake. Written By: Katy Cowan 25 June 2026 Co-founder Jeremy Sahlman I didn't meet Black Math in a boardroom.

I met two of their team – Travis Tyler and Louis Jannetty, both genuinely gorgeous humans – over a beer at OFFF Barcelona, after another brilliant festival, sharing jokes and banter, talking about everything from football and AI to the small absurdities of cultural differences. It told me everything I needed to know about the studio before I'd seen a single project: warm, curious, up for a laugh, and far more interested in people than in posturing. So when I sat down with co-founder Jeremy Sahlman, I already had a hunch the studio's story would be a good one. It is. It began like most great stories: without a plan.

Jeremy had left Los Angeles to go and live in the woods, well before remote work was common, so he found himself travelling back and forth to Boston, meeting people and trying to work out what came next. On one of those trips, he met Evan Fellers on the street. For the month that followed, Evan sent him an unbroken stream of videos – about his life, his ideas, the work he was making – until, almost inevitably, the two started collaborating.

"He had built something interesting, I had built something of my own," Jeremy says, "and over time we realised we were trying to create the same kind of future." Eventually, they each closed down what they had and built something together. That became Black Math. Although if there's one thing he likes to add, it's that the story was never really about two founders. "To me, a studio is an amalgamation of everyone's point of view," he says. "The good ones get reflected in the persona of the whole company.

That's the part I care about most." The Black Math Team Founded in Boston in 2012 as a boutique animation studio, Black Math has since grown into a globally connected creative partner working across design and technology, with people in Boston, New York, Portland, Richmond, and Costa Rica, and clients including Meta and Google. But ask Jeremy to define the studio's philosophy, and he's refreshingly honest about how long it took to find one. "It took us a long time to realise we even had a philosophy," he says. "Creative people tend not to hold beliefs too tightly.

Curiosity is part of the job." After enough years, though, the patterns started to emerge – and the biggest one has a name the studio now puts front and centre. They start with art. For Jeremy, "art" is less a medium than a moment. "It's when all the pieces lock together perfectly," he says. "The idea, the visuals, the writing, the interaction, the feeling. Everything supports everything else. It feels original. It feels inevitable. It feels like something that could only have come from the collective minds of the people who made it." That, he says, is what Black Math is chasing.

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This article discusses a unique approach to brand strategy that emphasizes creativity and partnership, which is significant for the industry, though the concepts of curiosity and art are not entirely new.