TRONVIG GROUP - Key Persons
Anne Mieth's fascination with design was cultivated more than 20 years ago when she started working in a typography studio in Dresden, Germany. There, she was first introduced to letterpress and the secrets of printing.
Passing through New York City, she became the art director for New York Moves Magazine and Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts, where she cut her teeth as a graphic designer.
Her attention to detail and ability to develop simple and elegant designs from complex raw materials, combined with the ability to solve complex design problems, opened up her next opportunity to work as an art director with Tronvig Group.
Collaborating actively as part of a multidisciplinary team, Anne has helped Tronvig Group establish and develop a range of brand and advertising design for our clients. Her hand is visible in such projects as the award-winning "I have a disability, but it does not have me." advertising campaign for Easterseals New Jersey, brand design projects for Lincoln Park Zoo, Media Development Investment Fund, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, and Pei Partnership Architects as well as the New-York Historical Society, Open House New York, and Center for Social Inclusion. As with any large project, the final result is a team effort, but her contributions are also notable in the visual brand system for the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the award-winning What is natural? and She Who Tells a Story advertising campaigns.
Constantly eager to expand her horizons, Anne has worked for us from various locales around the globe. With the recent addition of two children, she has settled down in Berlin where she works for us as senior art director.
Job Titles:
- Founder
- Cultural Communications Partner
"The team at Tronvig Group-with dedication, intelligence, and creativity-helps organizations to look inside themselves, reinvigorate their core philosophies, and embrace the future with renewed strength and purpose. As a partner, I hope that my work will both communicate-and celebrate-the new explorations and accomplishments that emerge from this process."
Elyse Topalian, LLC is a consultancy in New York City, formed in 2017, that offers strategic planning and communications to clients in the arts. Clients so far have included Louvre Abu Dhabi, the State Hermitage Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Communicating the Museum international conference.
Founder Elyse Topalian had a three-decade-long career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was most recently Vice President for Communications for eight years. At the Met, she headed the museum's press and advertising areas, leading a range of promotional campaigns for dozens of exhibitions annually, major capital projects and institutional initiatives, and announcements on a wide range of curatorial, conservation, education, digital, and other topics.
She serves on the boards of the Armenian Center at Columbia University and Pen + Bush, a non-profit that supports and promotes mid-career women artists and writers. She has published two books for young adults, on V. I. Lenin and Margaret Sanger.
Esmee is a designer and art director who has worked with some of the world's most notable advertising agencies including Ogilvy (New York and Tokyo), Grey New York, and R/GA New York, and has been involved in creating worldwide campaigns for brands as diverse as Discover, Instagram, AARP, Applebee's, Corteva, Asics, and Chemours.
Esmee graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven and started her design studio in Amsterdam. Her work touches on graphics and identity, visual design and advertising, for Dutch based clients such as Activia Netherland, Parley Messaging and Tulp Festival Amsterdam.
She has also led the visual implementation of SaaS platforms for corporations such as Deloitte, Accenture, Ernst and Young, ING, Unilever, DLL Financial Solutions Partner, and Booking.com.
Tronvig found Esmee while she was on hiatus in Hawai‘i and we are so glad we did.
Guo-Qing Zhang has been helping us avoid any notion of self-importance for some years now and along the way, she has been bringing us new clients. It's always good to have someone around who is impressed by nothing.
Guo-Qing was born in the northwestern deserts of Gansu, China during the Great Famine of 1958-61. Her grandfather was a merchant who transported his wares by caravan to desert oasis cities like Urumuchi.
Upon graduating from high school she was sent down by Mao to a mass collective farm, but after his death in 1976, she was accepted as one of the first students back at Beijing Central University of Art (now Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts and Design) just as China reopened its institutions of higher education following the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
She graduated in 1982 and was given a teaching position at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts where she taught for 5 years. During this time she completed a major public commission for the city of Xi'an and then obtained permission to leave the country to enter graduate school in Japan in 1987.
She studied under the dry lacquer master Shinkai Osamu of Kobe and graduated top of her class from Kyoto University of Fine Arts in 1991 with a Master of Fine Arts. She then moved to New York City with James Heaton and has been collaborating with him on various projects ever since.
Job Titles:
- Founder & Lead Strategist
Born the last son of a radical preacher man on a bluff overlooking the Illinois River in the small town of Ottawa, James Heaton grew up on the Space Coast of Florida. He left the U.S. at 19 for an 8-year odyssey in Asia, where, among other things, he traversed Tibet culminating in a near-death experience in the north (the story here), became a Theravadan Buddhist monk in Thailand, studied classical calligraphy under Yamauchi Kan in Kyoto, gained fluency in Japanese, studying fine art and East Asian History at Eckerd College, and late Hean Buddhist sculpture at Kyoto University Graduate School of Letters.
His first paying job was as a writer for Rasen-sha, the boutique Kyoto-based advertising agency run by the avant-garde thinker Takeda Yoshifumi. He contributed essays in Japanese and photographs to projects published in Esquire Japan, Seven Seas Magazine, 03 Tokyo Calling, and the Kyoto Journal, where he was a contributing editor for many years.
Visiting friends in New York in 1991, he finally found his true home. In New York, he entered the studio of the artists, architects, and philosophers Arakawa and Madeline Gins, where he worked on Helen Keller or Arakawa (Burning Books, 1994), Ubiquitous Site - Nagi's Ryoanji at the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park, Gifu, Japan, and the Guggenheim Museum retrospective exhibition.
In 1996, he founded and published the art magazine The Exhibitionist, which was distributed nationally, but it had to be shut down after a year because too much effort had gone into the product and not enough into marketing. This failure of marketing vision resulted in James shifting his career into marketing, where he has remained ever since. From 1997 to 2006, the company acted as a brand design subcontractor to New York advertising agencies, doing work for Digitas, Euro, Ogilvey, Saatchi & Saatchi, and many others. At the end of 2006, he took on a partner and brought the company direct to client as a boutique branding and advertising agency.
Monica joined Tronvig in 2021 with over 20 years of experience in medical marketing, technology, hospitality, tourism, and higher education industries. She is passionate about a project's details while not losing sight of the bigger vision.
Prior to joining Tronvig, Monica served as senior project manager for several fast-paced digital agencies managing projects related to content strategy, branding, and digital transformation. But the foundation of Monica's marketing experience originated at Oracle in the Silicon Valley, where she wore diverse hats over the course of ten years, including product marketing, trade show coordination, marketing operations, and strategic marketing.
Noelia is a highly engaged team player with a sharp focus on balancing audience needs with business goals. Her work as a strategist ecompasses brand strategy, marketing strategy, organizational alignment, and UX writing and content strategy.
She has helped clients across various sectors-from fintech startups to legacy healthcare organizations-clarify their differentiated value proposition, understand their audience's psychographic profiles, and develop a consistent brand voice through which to reach them. Noelia is adept at managing key stakeholders, advocating for the end user, and embracing a lifelong learning mindset.
Prior to working with Tronvig, Noelia was an editor at Berlin-based art and design publishing house Gestalten, where she oversaw the text content of over forty titles ranging from utopian architecture to still life photography, and wrote the preface to four books.
Job Titles:
- Management Consultant
- Artist
Diversity asks, "Who's in the room?" Equity responds: "Who is trying to get in the room but can't? Whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?"
Inclusion asks, "Has everyone's ideas been heard?" Justice responds, "Whose ideas won't be taken as seriously because they aren't in the majority?"
Radiah Lovette is an artist who serves cultural institutions in a leadership capacity. She is committed to racial equity and justice and supports internal dialogue and collaboration to promote action in organizations ready to examine long-established biases and limiting beliefs, and whose goals include becoming truly inclusive and accessible. Radiah has an extensive practice developing transformational experiences at the intersection of visual art, critical thinking, and social change.
In her career she has served as Executive Director and Curator at the Museum for African American Art in Tampa, Florida, Vice Director for Education and Program Development at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, in addition to being an author and consultant.
Radiah's mission is to create space for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)-to herald their humanity and include their gifts.