about
Her evocative work has been featured in the New York Times (Dec. 6, 2024), Metalsmith (2023, Vol 43 No 3), Belle Armoire Jewelry (Winter 2018, 2019, 2020), 100 Women of Jewelry, the Society of North American Goldsmiths As Good as Gold exhibition, and the Enamel Guild North East Under Fire 3 and Under Fire 4 exhibitions.
Teresa holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Kent State University (1992). She began her professional career as a cell animator and motion graphics designer for children's broadcast television. With the advancement of the internet in the mid-1990s, she moved her skills toward experimental nonlinear storytelling and later, web design for Fortune 1,000 companies. In 2004 she co-founded FORM, a creative services firm for nonprofits where she continues to serve as principal and chief creative officer. Her one-of-a-kind limited jewelry collections are available through her website with select pieces on offer at the Metal Museum. She works out of her studio near Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
Join Teresa in her studio on Instagram
From the Artist
As a career graphic designer and lifelong poet, I am drawn to narrative jewelry for its power to communicate. In my metalwork, I combine original verse, precious metals, and old-world goldsmithing techniques to explore contemporary themes of isolation, anxiety, and existential dread.
I enrolled in my first metals workshop in midlife to keep myself busy through the end of a painful marriage. When my teen stepson died in 2015, I poured my grief into my fledgling metalwork. I made a bracelet in his memory, etched with a poem to him; in the months that followed, I was comforted by its presence. From within this loss, I found my voice.
Today, I create expressive narrative and memento mori jewelry. I have had a lifelong affinity for writing contemporary poetry, and the concepts I convey in my writing and metalwork coalesce throughout my creative process, each informing and inspiring the other.
I grew up in rural Ohio on my grandparent's defunct farm, wading through sighing corn fields under humming power lines. I delighted in my grandmother's drafty farmhouse, the crumbling 19th-century poetry books, and the hidden room filled with blurry snapshots, tissue flowers, and inky letters from dead ancestors. Enchanted in this landscape of mysterious artifacts, I was content to draw and daydream among the faded tintypes, abandoned bureaus, and ghosts.
At university, I trained in the aesthetics of the Swiss School of graphic design. Though I don't often employ the minimal style of my formal training in my jewelry work, the design principles of visual organization and typography remain ever present.
How and When to Buy
Because her pieces are one-of-a-kind, when a piece is sold, Teresa won't make another just like it. However, she often explores similar themes in new collections or adds new pieces to past collections.