Translating psychological, cultural, and symbolic dynamics into frameworks for communication, insight, and transformation.
My interpretive lens draws from psychoanalytic theory, cultural critique, and poststructural analysis. This lens lets me trace how meaning is encoded, mediated, and reshaped across personal experience, collective identity, and cultural systems — focusing on symbolic and emotional forces, distinct from sociological models like symbolic interactionism.
As a cultural strategist and interpretive researcher, I help organizations navigate complexity through meaning, identity, and insight — translating cultural and psychological dynamics into clear, psychologically informed frameworks for communication, transformation, and strategic direction.
Foundations and Practice
Cultural Strategist and Interpretive Researcher
Snir Levi, 2018
I hold an MSc in Culture and Society (Honors) from the London School of Economics and a BA in Communication (Summa Cum Laude) from USC, where I focused on cultural theory, media and audience studies, semiotics, gender, consumer psychology, and applied psychoanalysis.
My early academic research explored how creative subcultures in Tel Aviv used digital platforms to reframe urban identity — reshaping the city’s symbolic economy, including how it was marketed, experienced, and contested.
I work at the intersection of symbolic systems, identity, embodiment, and narrative meaning — translating emotional and cultural depth into frameworks for understanding and change.
My practice blends cultural theory, media studies, and applied psychoanalysis with strategic advisory and grounded qualitative research. I help institutions, initiatives, and brands understand how meaning circulates — and how that insight can inform culturally intelligent, emotionally attuned, and outcome-aligned strategy.
I explore how lived experience, cultural narratives, and symbolic systems meet — revealing how meaning is shaped, mediated, and contested between everyday agency and broader structures of power.
I often begin with high-level inquiry: conducting literature reviews, media mapping, or landscape analysis to grasp the symbolic terrain, institutional context, and stakeholder aims.
I then move into communities, discourse, and lived experience — tracing where coherence unravels, anchors, or needs reframing.
Whether in for-profit, nonprofit, or public contexts, I help clients navigate this symbolic field with clarity and care.
Career Snapshot
Over the past decade, I’ve led cross-sector projects for global NGOs, city governments, health researchers, and cultural institutions — often working across the gap between grassroots meaning and institutional strategy.
Selected Roles:
– Research Consultant at Catalyst Group International LLC
– Insights Analyst at Stanford Genome Technology Center
– Leadership Fellow at the American Jewish Committee
Selected Projects:
My work has included:
– Grant writing and partnership development for Holocaust survivor services (via the German Claims Conference)
– Environmental and cultural strategy with KKL-JNF and Expo 2020
– Influencer and culture mapping for the City of Jerusalem — including ethnographic insight and strategic advising on authenticity in municipal narrative
– Narrative development and strategic messaging for ME/CFS and Long COVID at Stanford Genome Technology Center
– Symbolic discourse analysis on antisemitism and anti-Zionist ideology for the American Jewish Committee
Across all of these, I serve as a bridge between communities and institutions — surfacing symbolic undercurrents and translating them into clarity and direction, aligned with organizational goals while remaining reflective of human experience on the ground.
Philosophy and Method
Social and cultural research offers a magnifying lens into audiences, symbols, emotional undercurrents and cultural logics that shape human behavior.
It allows organizations — for-profit or not — to build strategy on real foundations: beliefs, practices, representational systems, and the affective tenor of the moment.
Whether analyzing digital ecologies, identity narratives, or grassroots cultural forms, I guide clients toward strategies that reflect — not overwrite — the cultural field they operate within.
My interpretive toolbox includes:
Discourse and thematic analysis
Literature and media review
Stakeholder interviews
Ethnographic observation
Semiotic interpretation
Narrative framing and translation
I approach narrative through a symbolic and psychodynamic lens, integrating emotional depth with interpretive frameworks grounded in cultural theory and psychoanalytic thought.
From policy campaigns to health equity tools, city branding to trauma discourse — I surface invisible meaning and translate it into insight, clarity, and direction.
Why People Work With Me
– I bridge symbolic and strategic worlds
– I translate emotional nuance into insight
– I see what others miss, and name what others feel
– I hold complexity with clarity and care
Writing and Long-Term Vision
Alongside strategy and research work, I write essays exploring chronic illness, grief, gender, symbolic trauma, and the emotional life of Jewish/Israeli identity — published in The Times of Israel, The Daily Trojan, and other platforms.
My writing carries the same aims as my research: to bridge theory and feeling, and to render the symbolic material of life visible and alive.
I’m currently deepening my focus on psychodynamic and trauma-informed modalities, with the long-term goal of integrating this insight into therapeutic practice.
You can learn more about 1:1 reflection sessions with me here.
While chronic illness sometimes shapes my pace, it also sharpens my listening — to the emotional undercurrents that matter most.
For those who speak in typologies, I’m an INFJ-T with a Ni–Fi core and a 4w5 sx/sp instinctual stacking. I’m guided by intuition, depth, and a quiet pull to give shape to meaning — especially when it’s still forming, or felt more than known.
That inner process shapes how I work: tracing symbolic and emotional patterns, connecting psychological and cultural threads, and, in my consulting work, translating them into research-based insight and strategy.
At heart, I’m drawn to integration, symbolic healing, and emotional depth.
When I’m not immersed in cultural questions or symbolic patterns, I’m swimming, writing melodies on the piano, and exploring the emotional topographies of cities that have shaped me — from Tel Aviv and Stockholm to LA, NYC, Jerusalem, and London.
I find grounding in nature and recharge through quality time with friends and family — ideally with food, laughter, and just the right amount of ridiculousness.
—
If you’d like to collaborate, learn more, or explore shared threads — I’d love to connect.