From Graphic Design to Grand Stages: Emily Pierce on the Power of an Open Creative Path
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From Graphic Design to Grand Stages: Emily Pierce on the Power of an Open Creative Path
Welcome back to Style to Set, where we delve into the minds of the brilliant creatives who build the beautiful worlds we see in media. Host Callie Blount is joined by her amazing friend, Emily Pierce, an artist whose creative journey is a masterclass in embracing the unknown. Emily is a graphic designer, a fine artist, an art director, and a prop stylist who has decorated sets for major brands and is now designing captivating experiences for live music tours. Her story is a testament to the power of staying open, refusing to be pigeonholed, and letting the creative process be the ultimate guide. Prepare to gather some incredible creative nuggets from a woman who has navigated the wild, wonderful world of a multi-faceted artistic career.
The Practical Artist: Laying the Foundation
Like many creatives, Emily Pierce has always been an artist. But faced with the daunting "starving artist" trope and practical-minded parents who encouraged her to learn tangible skills, she chose a pragmatic path. She enrolled at Belmont University in Nashville for graphic design, a decision influenced by her godmother, who was also a designer. "My parents were like, you need to learn tools," Emily recalls. "What you do with them, you can do anything with them. Just, you need to learn these things."
That practical foundation led her to a job at a luxury luggage company, an experience that blew the doors open on her understanding of the creative world. School can’t prepare you for everything; there isn't a course for every niche career path that exists. Young, excited, and fueled by creativity, Emily was sent all over the country for trade shows and tasked with placing products in TV shows and movies. It was here she got her first glimpse into a whole other industry: the world of set building and fabrication. "There's like a whole industry of people that are building sets for trade shows," she realized, finding herself, a 23-year-old, in meetings with factory owners trying to win massive contracts.
When the company was bought and relocated to Boston, Emily chose to stay in Nashville and dive headfirst into the unpredictable waters of freelance life.
The Freelance Wilderness: Touching the Electric Fence
For any creative, the leap from a stable job to the freelance world is a daunting one. Emily describes this period as her "creative exploration years," a time made possible by a supportive partner who handled the practicalities like healthcare while she figured things out. But that freedom came with its own set of challenges.
The biggest lesson? "It is very easy to waste time," Emily laughs. However, the real difficulty of freelance wasn't just managing time, but managing the immense pressure to define herself. "I always felt this need to like, 'Oh, I gotta figure out my niche and I just have to go and I have to build these walls and these parameters around this,'" she explains. This pressure to specialize, often taught in school, was the complete opposite of her natural inclination. "I'm just like a very collect knowledge from all different areas and use that to inspire and influence what I'm doing."
She wasn't without work; her time at the luxury brand had given her a strong network and contract work. The struggle wasn't financial, but internal. It was a search for a specific kind of creative fulfillment, an itch she couldn't quite scratch. She calls it a time of being in "open waters," of "touching the electric fence to see if you liked it or not" before moving on. It was a period of ups and downs, a "creative purgatory" that ultimately cemented a crucial lesson: it's okay to be uncomfortable, and it's okay not to have the answer.
This experience gave her a new kind of confidence, a peek behind the curtain of how others present themselves. "As cheesy as this is, how other people are presenting themselves is not the reality of what their life is," she shares. This realization was freeing. It allowed her to fully embrace her identity as a lifelong learner and to find joy not in the destination, but in the journey itself.
"What I love about my work...is the process," Emily states passionately. "Being in bed with that messy process. Working with people, personalities, technical difficulties, whatever it is, like it's, I find that incredibly satisfying."
Finding the Frame: The Joy of Rules and Prop Styling
During her freelance exploration, Emily made a pivotal discovery about her own creative nature. While touching all those electric fences, she realized something surprising: she likes rules. In a world of infinite possibilities, she needed parameters to push against. "If you give me rules and you give me a wall, I'm gonna figure out how to climb out of it," she says. "But if no one is there giving me that challenge...I just wasn't at the maturity level to give myself those sort of boundaries at that time."
This need for structure led her to Nashville photographer Kyle Drier. Initially, she helped with his studio's design and marketing, a role she took on to relieve the pressure of promoting herself as an artist. It was a joy to work with him, and it was Kyle, a fellow curious creative, who opened the next door for her. During internal test shoots, he saw her natural talent for arranging objects and creating scenes. He started telling clients she was his in-house prop stylist.
With her trademark "blind confidence," Emily simply said, "Yeah, I got this." And she did. She jumped into the world of prop styling and set decorating, a field where clients provide a creative deck—a vision of a minimal environment with white stone and pops of color, for instance—and the stylist brings it to life. Emily thrived, sourcing materials, providing options, and building contained, beautiful worlds for photoshoots.
But true to her nature, she quickly found herself craving a bigger challenge. The condensed world of tabletop food shoots wasn't creatively fulfilling enough. "I know that I like variety. I need change. I crave change," she admits. She wanted more creative control, a chance to build bigger worlds and deliver a more complete vision for a brand. This drive pushed her toward bigger scenic builds and even more ambitious projects.
The Baddie Winkle Job: Dying Couches and Juggling a Newborn
One of Emily's most memorable leaps into larger-scale set building was for a shoot celebrating the 90th birthday of Baddie Winkle, the vivacious, virally popular "styling grandma." The project, a collaboration with a major financial brand, required building two distinct sets in a tiny studio—and on a tight timeline.
"The people that make the stuff tend to be the last to know," Emily says of a common industry theme where the art department gets the brief at the last minute. She had just four days to find a "giant, very particular couch" with a budget that felt like "$3." This is where the hustle and creativity of a set decorator truly shine. "It's a lot of Craigslist and it's a lot of just hunting," she says. The challenge culminated in her spending days dyeing and painting a massive couch purple, all while "praying that this looks good on camera." She even broke out a 3D printer to create a giant, bedazzled chain with the company's name.
The story becomes even more incredible when she reveals the personal context: her son had been born just three weeks earlier. "I just was so trying to find myself again," she shares. "I probably shouldn't have gone back to work that soon, but it was an adventure." The shoot involved juggling a newborn while calling in favors from friends to help wrap giant, prop birthday cakes in fondant. It was a whirlwind of creative chaos and a perfect example of the wild, unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding life of a set builder.
From Sets to Stages: The World of Live Entertainment
Emily’s relentless pursuit of new challenges eventually led her to her current role in live entertainment. She now works with Cour Design, a Nashville-based live production firm, where she serves as a creative director alongside a full technical team. After years of freelancing, she once again found herself drawn to the structure and community of a team. "It's nice to work with teams of people that have all sorts of knowledge they're consistently imparting on you," she says.
At Cour, she and her team build entire shows from start to finish. The work is varied; for some artists, she might do everything, while for others she might focus solely on a set design or art direct the content for video screens. This à la carte approach suits her love of variety perfectly. She's worked on projects for some of music's biggest names, including doing content for a Shawn Mendes performance at the European Video Awards and serving as the creative director for Maren Morris's upcoming album visuals. One of her main clients is Foster the People, for whom she recently designed a performance on The Tonight Show.
This work is the future of design, a forward-thinking space where environments, lighting, and visuals converge to create unforgettable live experiences. It's the culmination of Emily's entire journey—a role that requires her graphic design sensibilities, her artistic eye, her set-building know-how, and her leadership abilities.
The Definition of Beauty: A Radical Openness
After a career spent creating beauty in so many different forms, what does the concept mean to Emily now? Her answer is simple, yet profound.
"I would say it's just an openness," she reflects.
For her, beauty is found in being open to different personalities, especially the difficult ones. It's in being open to the messy, unpredictable process of creation and not knowing where it will lead. It's resisting the urge to lock onto a solution too early, which can shut down the possibility of "happy accidents." Her favorite thing is a safe-space brainstorm, where even the "dumbest stuff" can be said, because it might just piggyback into a brilliant idea.
"To me...that's beauty," she concludes. "Just being open to not having the answer and open to the process and just open to the unknown. That's where I find beauty and joy."
This philosophy is the thread that runs through her entire career. It was present in her freelance days when she bravely explored the unknown, and it's visible in her collaborative work today. Emily Pierce's journey is a powerful reminder that the most beautiful and fulfilling creative paths are rarely straight lines. They are winding, messy, and glorious roads paved with curiosity, courage, and a radical openness to whatever comes next.
