Our team

Roger Sametz, President

Roger Sametz, President and founder of Sametz Blackstone Associates, received a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture.

He serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Associates of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the Board of Directors of the Corporate Design Foundation, the Board of Directors of the Boston Center for Arts, the Corporate Executive Council of WGBH, and is an Overseer of Boston Ballet. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Longy School of Music and is a Corporator of the Schepens Eye Research Institute. He is a member of the Design Management Institute and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and for three years was president of the Boston chapter. Roger has also served on the boards of the American Jewish Committee; the Boston Preservation Alliance; Collage, a chamber music ensemble; and New Voices, a writer’s theater in Boston.

Roger has been a guest lecturer at the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Johnson School of Management at Cornell. For twelve years he taught at the Art Institute of Boston and the University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth. He has twice been a featured speaker at the IBM Design Leadership Symposium; he was a speaker at the national Bio conference in Seattle and at the Design Management Institute’s conference on brand re-imaging held in Montreal. Most recently, he addressed the Association of Fundraising Professionals, in a talk titled Branding isn’t just about soap and cereal anymore; he has been a featured speaker at Columbia Business School on The impact of branding on design and design on branding; Roger has been a featured speaker at three Association of Independent Research Institute (AIRI) conferences and delivered a talk, Branding: beyond the buzz, at the annual conference of general management schools. He has juried design contests here and abroad and was a past national chairman of the AIGA Communication Graphics show. Most recently he spoke on Branding beyond the hype at the yearly CASE Summit conference in Chicago and at the national conference of the League of American Orchestras in Nashville.

Podcasts and interviews have been broadcast / pubished in Business Week, Forbes.com, Boston Business Journal, Mass High Tech, the Boston Globe, BtoB, University Business, and Design Management Journal. Major articles include:

> Beyond the corporate sphere: branding in academia;
> Storytelling through design;
> Creating and communicating value(s);
> Designing dialogues;
> A strong brand is integral to successful fundraising;
> What for-profit organizations can learn from non-profits.

Since founding Sametz Blackstone in 1979, Roger has collaborated with a wide range of organizations to help them to better communicate their value—and values—to constituents whose interest and support are critical to each organization’s growth and success. Representative academic, research, and cultural clients include: Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (and associated Genome Center), the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Los Angeles Center for Biomedical Research (LA BioMed), the Boston Symphony Orchestra (including Pops and Tanglewood), the San Francisco Symphony, the Celebrity Series of Boston, Boston Ballet, League of American Orchestras, Boston Center for the Arts, the American Ireland Fund, the Boston Public Library, Harvard Museum of Natural History, the New England Aquarium, WBUR and WGBH.

Corporate and professional service clients have included: Goodwin Procter LLP, Abt Associates, Arthur D. Little, Compaq / Digital, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Raytheon Company, Crane & Company, State Street, BankBoston, United Asset Management, Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, as well as a range of high-tech start-ups and a leading global business consultancy.