Tia Kalas

VP, Creative Director

After being accepted to Carnegie Mellon to pursue a degree in graphic design, she made a last-minute decision to re-route to American University, making DC her home for the first decade of her career. Starting out at a boutique design firm, she fostered her love of Swiss design, conceptual creative work, and client relationships. DC’s cosmopolitan and international scene became the inspiration behind a lot of her award-winning work, with clients such as the National Gallery of Art, The Urban Institute, and Georgetown University.

After a short stop at AOL during Northern Virginia’s dot com boom, she moved to Wunderman DC, setting the stage for a focus in health care advertising, working with Abbot Labs and Novo Nordisk.

In 2010, she found her way to Pittsburgh and started her tenure at GH. From the start, she was instrumental in setting the design tone, managing the creative workload, shaping the company culture, and building client relationships with UPMC, Federated Investors, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Heinz History Center to name a few. These accounts would come to be the foundation of the agency’s growth over the years. She is currently a VP/Creative Director, overseeing these same accounts with a growing team.

During her time at GH, she has won numerous awards, including OBIEs, the Best of Show trophy at the American Advertising Awards in New York, a Judges Award of Excellence, and a Mosaic Award at the Pittsburgh American Advertising Awards for work that celebrates diversity in advertising. Tia’s worldviews and cultural IQ help to make the people around her better, and her client work more relevant to a larger audience. Always incorporating cutting-edge design trends into her concepts, Tia’s work celebrates advertising in its purest form: making a genuine connection to one person at a time.