Studio Director

Company Description

Arc is the lead shopper and retail agency within Publicis Groupe. In an era of unprecedented disruption, where the customers you seek actively resist brands like never before, everything we do is in service of making your brand irresistible. We call it Irresistible Commerce. And it starts by employing insights and data to uncover what’s standing in the way of growth.

Then we deploy irresistible creative solutions to build connected shopping experiences that are personal, valuable and delightful for your customers. The results simultaneously drive brand sales and love. Helping us become WARC’s #1 Specialty Retail Agency with groundbreaking work recognized by Adweek, ANA Reggie Awards and Effies.

The Studio Director is an energetic, collaborative, forward-looking senior leader that provides day-to-day oversight, operational discipline, creative production oversight, innovation, and change leadership for a multidisciplinary studio team delivering high-quality design adaptation, production art, presentation, digital, web, and print assets. The Studio Director will help unify ways of working across teams while preserving the strengths, craft standards, and client knowledge each team brings.

This leader will partner closely with Studio leadership, peer Studio Director, Creative, Account, Strategy, Operations, and Production teams to build a consistent, scalable studio model that delivers work accurately, efficiently, on brand, on budget, and on schedule.

This position is ideal for an adaptive, production-minded creative leader who can lead through organizational change and industry transformation, align teams around common standards, mentor managers and individual contributors, and translate business priorities into practical studio processes. The successful candidate will bring strong design judgment, deep production expertise, executive communication skills, and a proven ability to build trust across teams during periods of growth, integration, and transformation.

• Lead the studio design team to ensure consistent standards, equitable resourcing, and aligned ways of working across both teams.
• Provide steady leadership by building trust, clarifying roles and responsibilities, supporting change adoption, and creating a shared operating rhythm.
• Translate the Head of Studio’s vision into actionable team goals, staffing plans, workflow improvements, quality expectations, and measurable operating practices.
• Establish and reinforce studio governance, including intake expectations, prioritization, escalation paths, approval procedures, version control, file release standards, and communication protocols.
• Lead workforce planning and resource allocation for assigned accounts, work streams, or capability areas, balancing capacity, skill mix, deadlines, business priorities, and team development needs. Monitor industry trends, innovation (AI and automation), production technologies, design tools, and workflow innovations to strengthen studio capability. Proactively explore, test, and pilot emerging tools to Manage, coach, and develop studio managers, designers, production artists, and other studio team members through clear expectations, feedback, performance conversations, career development, and succession planning.
• Create an inclusive, collaborative studio culture that values flexibility, accountability, craft excellence, operational consistency, transparency, and respectful partnership across teams.
• Oversee project timelines, budgets, priorities, risks, dependencies, and quality control to ensure studio deliverables are completed accurately, efficiently, and on schedule.
• Partner with Creative, Account, Strategy, Operations, and Production leadership to align scope, staffing, milestones, client expectations, production requirements, and final delivery standards.
• Guide the extension and translation of approved creative concepts into production-ready digital, web, presentation, and print content while ensuring work remains aligned to brand standards and project direction.
• Represent the studio in senior-level meetings by providing operational insight, staffing…