Ann Kreis
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Original Appointment: October 2007

A born-and-raised Californian, Ann Kreis headed to the East Coast for college (B.A. Harvard College, 1976; M.B.A. Harvard Business School, 1979).

Kreis began her marketing career in Spain in 1979, where she was product manager for Oil of Olay, and came back to the U.S. in 1982, where she worked in packaged-goods marketing for Richardson-Vicks, now part of Proctor & Gamble. For most of the '80s, Kreis was vice president of marketing at Citibank New York, mostly in product development for the retail bank. In 1990 she moved to Boston and worked as vice president of marketing, new products, for Scudder, Stevens & Clark mutual funds.

Kreis married Juan Carlos Torres, managing director of Advent International Private Equity, and the family moved back to Spain in 1992, this time with three young daughters. Kreis did consulting work in Spain for beverage companies through Dove Associates, a Boston-based consulting firm.

In 1996 the family moved to Mexico City so that Juan Carlos could launch the first Advent Latin American fund. Kreis reinvented herself as a college professor and has taught marketing, advertising, consumer behavior, and market research methods for the past 10 years at Endicott College Mexico. She also works as a college counselor for the Greengates International School in Mexico City.

Over the past decade in the world's largest city, Kreis has served on the board of ContactoCultural, a Mexican-U.S. nonprofit association to promote cultural exchange through the arts; president of the Greengates PTA; deacon of Union Church; and many other assorted volunteer positions in the expatriate community.

While Kreis comes from a family full of musicians, the gene skipped her, but hit hard on the next generation. Her oldest daughter, Elena Torres, is a junior at the University of Southern California, majoring in theater, minoring in film, and working two days at week at MTV News in LA. The second daughter, Emma Torres, was just accepted to Berklee for guitar performance and is a heavy metal guitarist with an up-and-coming band in Mexico, SinRage. The third daughter, Paloma Torres, about to turn 16, is a jazz singer who has studied with Magos Herrera in Mexico City and will be spending the summer of 2007 at the Five-Week Summer Performance Program at Berklee.

Kreis is eager to collaborate with Berklee on marketing and communications projects. She especially hopes that her experience of living many years in Spain and Mexico can be of use to the college.