I’m Chris Tieri—a lifelong creative with a designer’s eye, a strategist’s instinct, and a tendency to make things bolder, brighter, and more beautiful.
After 24 years running a brand and marketing agency, I traded client strategy and execution for creative freedom, experimentation, and exploration.
These days, I paint, print, collage, upcycle, design spaces, and follow whatever creative rabbit hole looks interesting. I call it REALtirement: less retirement, more getting back to the real stuff—making, experimenting, learning, and seeing where an idea leads.
Decades in branding and business still shape how I see things—how ideas connect, stories take shape, and details add up.
Same instincts. Different canvas.
Bio
Christine (Chris) Tieri is a lifelong creative whose work has spanned art, design, branding, entrepreneurship, and business strategy.
She earned a BFA in Advertising Design from Syracuse University, including a semester in Florence, before heading to Madison Avenue. As an Art Director at Geer DuBois and later Warwick Baker Fiore, she created national campaigns, shot commercials on location, and caught the tail end of the Mad Men era—three-martini lunches and all.
After six years in New York, Chris returned to Massachusetts and co-founded the award-winning agency smith&jones with longtime BFF and fellow ad veteran Jean Giguere Beaupre. They built an agency known for smart strategy, compelling creative, and the coolest office in town—an old Worcester mill complete with a vintage diner and a half basketball court with a purple floor. Chris later evolved the firm into idea agency, serving mission-driven clients in higher education, healthcare, nonprofits, and financial services.
Over 24 years as an agency owner, Chris led brand transformations for hundreds of organizations nationwide, blending strategy, storytelling, and design to build stronger brands. Her work earned numerous creative and leadership honors, including Worcester Business Journal’s Outstanding Women in Business and 40 Under 40, along with frequent invitations to speak on branding, creativity, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
After selling the agency, Chris spent seven years at longtime client Old Sturbridge Village, where her role as Chief Marketing Officer extended well beyond marketing. She helped guide the museum through some of its most challenging and transformative years—navigating COVID-19 and the post-pandemic rebuild, shaping its 75th anniversary, developing special programming and promotions, and bringing Antiques Roadshow to the Village.
Creativity was never something Chris left at the office. Over the years, she has renovated and redesigned more than a dozen homes and workspaces and has long been drawn to the possibilities hidden in old buildings, found objects, unexpected materials, and ideas waiting to be reimagined.
Now in what she affectionately calls REALtirement, Chris’s growing art practice spans painting, printmaking, collage, mixed media, upcycling, and interior design—usually with more than one experiment underway at a time.
After decades of turning ideas into words, images, brands, and experiences, she now gets up every morning to see where her creative instincts take her next.
When she’s not making art, reimagining a space, traveling, or enjoying time with her three young adult sons, Chris splits her time between Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Rhode Island, with her husband Dennis Antonopoulos and their delightfully opinionated Havanese, Tito.