In my experience, 'creative coding' work opportunities happen in the follow ways:
- Personal connections are huge. Agencies, especially those connected with advertising, are likely not tech-savvy enough to understand the specific contribution that you can bring to a project. They will often rely on someone who already has rapport and knowledge of creative coding within their organization to recruit more talent. Its to your advantage to know those people.
- Have presence in the community of your creative coding platform(s) of choice as an expert. Answer question on the forums. Teach workshops. Write tutorials. Or simply just share work. To that end, you might be able to build rapport with the people mentioned in the first point.
- Create compelling projects using creative coding platforms, whether its a useful data visualization or just a thing of beauty. It doesn't have to be a paid project. Then promote the heck out of it. Invite people to blog about it, critique it. Absorb the critique. Share the code on github. A lot of work gets created in these communities that goes unnoticed because it doesn't get to the right channels.
- Build a compelling portfolio that non-tech/creative types can appreciate, but at the same time doesn't remove you of your hacker cred--it should be obvious that you coded this stuff in the written language that you use and the images that your present. In grad school, you might have been able to present each project as fun or research, but now you need to shift the presentation in a way that offers value to the outside world. Consider the practical applications of what you've created (even if practical had originally been the last thing on your mind) and list those (e.g. "this kind of dynamic 3D data visualization could be used to visualize data x more effectively because..." ). The other option is to have a portfolio that only the creative coding community will appreciate. But than it will be up to someone else to convince business-minded folks to work with you.
- It may be to your benefit to take a standard gig as an Engineer or Interaction Designer before attempting to do something like this professionally. A creative coder who has engineering, graphic design, or interaction design professional experience can be a huge asset to a project. It may also be an entry point for discussion with the people that you are working with, who may not really get what you are doing otherwise. Also, you may choose to (or financially need to) do other work between these special projects, so doing something complimentary could be a good use of your time.
- It's important to keep coding. Don't wait for paid projects to fall into your lap. The people who do this well live and breath this stuff, and sometimes after a full days work on a commercial gig, go home and work on an art project project or even putting together their own library or framework.