PROGRAM CHAIR AND CO-FOUNDERS
Alice Twemlow, chair and program co-founder
Alice Twemlow writes about design for publications including Arena, Baseline, Communication Arts, Design Issues, Design Observer, Good, Eye, Grafik, Graphis, I.D., New York Magazine, Paper, Print, The Architect's Newspaper, and Varoom. She is the author of What is Graphic Design For? (Rotovision, 2006), StyleCity New York (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and has contributed essays to Jonathan Barnbrook's monograph, Barnbrook Bible (Booth Clibborn, 2007), Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design (Allworth Press, 2007), ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING (Design Institute, 2006), and Why Not Associates 2 (Thames & Husdon, 2004). She has directed several design conferences, including "Voice: AIGA National Design Conference 2002," and "Being Here: Craft and Locality in Graphic Design," held in Berlin in 2004, and co-directed "Looking Closer: AIGA Conference on Design History and Criticism." Alice is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum History of Design program in London.
» Click here to read Twemlow's essay titled Design Criticism's Winding Road
[www.designobserver.com]
Steven Heller, program co-founder
Steven Heller writes a monthly column on graphic design books for The New York Times Book Review and is co-chair of MFA Design at the School of Visual Arts. He has written more than 100 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design Second Edition, Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age, Graphic Design History, Citizen Designer, Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer, The Push Pin Graphic: Twenty Five Years of Design and Illustration, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits, The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design. He edits VOICE: The AIGA Online Journal of Graphic Design, and writes for Baseline, Design Observer, Eye, Grafik, I.D., Metropolis, Print, and Step. Steven is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the School of Visual Arts' Masters Series Award.
» Click here to read Heller's essay titled Dada-Vu
[www.hellerbooks.com]
Kurt Andersen is the co-creator and host of Studio 360, WNYC and Public Radio International's art and culture program. He is the author of best-selling novels Heyday (Random House, 2007), and Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999) and writes a monthly column for New York Magazine called "The Imperial City." Formerly, Kurt was a design critic and cultural columnist for Time and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Spy, editor-in-chief at New York Magazine and a staff writer and columnist at The New Yorker. He curated the exhibition "Faster, Newer, Cheaper, More: Revolutions of 1848," at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2004. Kurt's numerous awards include a Peabody Award, a New York Magazine "100 People Who Changed New York" accolade and an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island School of Design.
Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli is curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Since 1994, Paola has curated the following landmark exhibitions: "Achille Castiglioni: Design!;" "Humble Masterpieces;" "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design; " "SAFE: Design Takes on Risk;" "Thresholds: Contemporary Design from the Netherlands;" "Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer:" and "Workspheres." For these accomplishments she received the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Design Mind Award. She was also appointed senior fellow at the Royal College of Art, London and given an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. Prior to joining the staff at MoMA, Paola was the editor of Abitare and a contributing editor to Domus. Among the books she has written are: Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design and Objects of Design from the Museum of Modern Art. She also writes for publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Harvard Design, I.D., Metropolis, Nest, and Paper.
[www.moma.org/collection/depts/arch_design/index.html]
Michael Bierut
Michael Bierut is a partner in the international design consultancy Pentagram and a co-founder of the online design magazine, Design Observer. A selection of the essays he has written for Design Observer, since its founding in 2003, has been collected under the title Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). Michael is co-editor of Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, vols. 1 through 5 and a regular contributor to I.D. magazine and to Public Radio International's arts program "Studio 360." He is also a senior critic in Graphic Design at Yale University School of Art. Among the many honors Michael has received is a Medal of Excellence by the AIGA, an organization for which he was the president from 1998 to 2001, and most recently the 2008 Cooper Hewitt National Design Mind Award.
Akiko Busch
Akiko Busch has written about design and culture since 1979. She is the author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live and The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design an the Everyday. Her most recent book of essays, Nine Ways to Cross a River, a collection of essays about swimming across American Rivers, was published in 2007 by Bloomsbury/USA. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for 20 years. Her essays have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, and she has written articles for Architectural Record, Elle, Home, House & Garden, Metropolitan Home, London Financial Times, The New York Times, Traditional Home, Travel & Leisure and Wallpaper*, among other publications. In Fall, 2005 she served as a Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. She has lectured widely on architecture and design and has appeared on public radio in the U.S. and Canada. Currently, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Sunday regional section.
Ralph Caplan
Ralph Caplan is a contributing editor at Print magazine, a regular contributor to VOICE: The AIGA Online Journal of Graphic Design and has written articles for Design Quarterly, Interior Design, The New York Times, and House and Garden. He began his long and distinguished career in design journalism in the late 1950's as editor-in-chief at I.D. Magazine. His books include By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons (Fairchild, 2005) and Cracking the Whip: Essays On Design And Its Side Effects (Fairchild, 2005). Ralph has also written extensively for and about the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. He is a director emeritus of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, an honorary member of IDSA, and, in 2005, was a writer-in-residence at Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts.
» Click here to read Caplan's essay titled Theoretically Challenged
[www.aiga.org/content.cfm/voice]
Andrea Codrington
Andrea Codrington is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer specializing in design and visual culture. With 18 years of experience in New York's art, design and architecture worlds, Codrington has been a columnist for The New York Times, an editor at Phaidon Press, senior editor at I.D. Magazine and a guest critic and lecturer at Parsons School of Design, Yale University, Cranbrook Institute, University of the Arts and Pratt. She is the co-author of Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics and sole author of Kyle Cooper: Monographics and has written extensively for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Metropolitan Home, Metropolis and Cabinet. She is currently working on her first novel.
» Click here to read Codrington's essay titled Modernist Malice
[www.cabinetmagazine.org]
Michael Eng
Michael Eng teaches in the Critical and Visual Studies Program at Pratt Institute, where he offers courses in aesthetics, Marxist Urban Theory and Feminist Film Theory. He has served as co-director of Pratt's International Summer Seminar in Architecture and Urban Design and has co-taught design courses in Pratt's undergraduate architecture program. An alumnus of the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program, he has published essays on Jean-Luc Godard's tvideo projects and on the work of artists Renée Green, Knut Âsdam, and Maryam Jafri. He is currently co-authoring a textbook on critical thinking in design and architecture with the architect Dan Bucsescu, and he is also preparing a book manuscript on philosophy and architecture entitled, The Architectural Imaginary: "Bodies," "Space," and the Completion of Meta-physics in the Globalization of the Image.
Russell Flinchum
Russell Flinchum is archivist for the Century Association Archives Foundation in New York. He is the author of Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (Rizzoli International Publications/National Design Museum, 1997), a book which garnered several awards including, an AIA International Architecture Book Award and the Decorative Arts Society's Charles F. Montgomery Award. In 1997 he was the guest curator of "Henry Dreyfuss, Directing Design: The Industrial Designer and His Work, 1929-1972" at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Russell, who received a PhD from The Graduate Center at City University of New York, is a frequent lecturer at conferences and design schools. His current experience is as a lecturer in the Department of Education at The Museum of Modern Art.
Janet Froelich
Janet Froelich is creative director of The New York Times Magazine and of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Under her direction The New York Times Magazine has won more than 60 gold and silver awards from the Art Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Society of Newspaper Designers. In 2004 Janet began work on the repositioning and redesign of the Part II publications of The New York Times Magazine. She directed the design and launch of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, a new monthly style magazine devoted to men's and women's fashion, design, food and travel, Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, and Key: The New York Times Real Estate Magazine. Play was named one of the 10 best magazine launches of the year by Media Industry Newsletter. Janet is a 2006 recipient of The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame award and has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts graduate and undergraduate design programs.
Emily Gordon
Emily Gordon is the managing editor at Print magazine and writes frequently for the magazine. She has been on the editorial staff of numerous publications, including The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, Grand Street and Legal Affairs. She has written about media, culture, technology, and politics for publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Salon.com, and The Washington Post Book World, and has contributed to several books. She has an MFA from New York University and has taught expository and creative writing. Since December 2004, she has edited the website Emdashes.com, which examines language, mores, design, and other subjects through the lens of The New Yorker magazine and its wealth of contributors past and present.
Karrie Jacobs
Karrie Jacobs is contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, "America," about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape, and is a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure, where she writes about destinations of interest to the architectural tourist. She is author of The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (Viking, 2006), a book about housing in America. Between 1999 and 2002 Karrie was the founding editor in chief of Dwell, a San Francisco-based magazine about modern residential architecture and design. Prior to launching Dwell, Karrie served as the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and she has written about design, technology, and visual language for many periodicals including The New York Times, I.D., and Fortune. And in the early 1990s, Jacobs was the founding executive editor of Benetton's Colors Magazine.
» Click here to read Jacob's essay titled I Am the Uncool Hunter: Do "factory-like" subdivisions spell the end of the loft as a meaningful cultural symbol?
[www.karriejacobs.com]
Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini
Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini joined The Museum of Modern Art in New York in February 2004 and has collaborated with Senior Curator Paola Antonelli on the exhibitions and publications Humble Masterpieces, SAFE: Design Takes On Risk, and Design and the Elastic Mind. In conjunction with Paola, she is currently working on Design Bites, a book about foods as design objects and an upcoming exhibition on Rod Arad to open at MoMA in 2009. Born in Mallorca, Spain, she graduated with a master's degree in architecture from the School of Architecture in Barcelona and holds a PhD in Architecture from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. As an architect she has worked at Carme Pinos' studio in Barcelona and has been a teaching assistant at the School of Architecture in Barcelona and at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University.
[www.moma.org/collection/depts/arch_design/index.html]
Alexandra Lange
Alexandra Lange is a journalist and an architectural historian. She is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and writes articles about architecture, design and urban planning for Metropolis, Domino and The New York Times. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has contributed essays and articles to peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of Design History and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Alexandra has taught architectural criticism at New York University and delivered papers on her research at the Society of Architectural Historians 59th Annual Meeting and the 2005 Buell Dissertation Colloquium at Columbia University.
» Click here to read Lange's essay titled Building the (New) New York, The Bob and Jane Way
[http://nymag.com]
Julie Lasky
Julie Lasky is the editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine. Previously, she was editor-in-chief at Interiors and the managing editor at Print. Julie has authored a monograph on the Seattle poster artist Art Chantry, titled Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books, 2001). She is one of ten contributing curators in &Fork: 100 Designers, 10 Curators, 10 Good Designs (Phaidon Press, 2007) and has contributed essays to Households by Mark Robbins (Monacelli Press, 2006) and Dish: International Design for the Home, Julie Muller Stahl, ed. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), among others. As a design journalist Julie has also contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, Metropolis, Architecture, Dwell, Surface, Graphis, Grid, Print and Eye. Julie has been a guest instructor at the MA program in History of Decorative Arts & Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum/Parsons The New School for Design and a guest critic at Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL), Switzerland. She has also taught on SVA's MFA Design program. Julie was a juror for the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism in 2006 and since 2005 has served as a juror for the National Magazine Awards. She was the recipient of a National Arts Journalism Fellowship from Columbia University and was also a National Arts Journalism Fellow at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
Elaine Louie
Elaine Louie is assistant to the editor, House and Home section of The New York Times, and a contributor to the paper's House & Home, Dining and Sunday Styles sections. She is the author of several books about food, entertaining and interior decoration including The Shun Lee Cookbook (Harper Collins, 2007) House Beautiful: Collections on Display (Hearst Books and Sterling Publishing, 2003), and Living with Textiles (Sterling Publishers and Mitchell Beazley, 2001). Elaine was the recipient of the 1995 James Beard Journalism Award for a series of articles on ethnic cuisine in New York City, which she wrote for the Living Section (now the Dining Section) of The New York Times.
Matilda McQuaid
As deputy curatorial director and head of the Textiles department at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Matilda McQuaid oversees one of the premier textile collections in the world. Since joining the museum in 2001, McQuaid has curated a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions, among them "Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living" (2004) and "Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance" (2005). Currently, McQuaid is organizing the exhibition, "China Constructs: New Visions of Domestic Architecture" scheduled for 2008. McQuaid came to Cooper-Hewitt after a 15-year tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she organized more than 30 exhibitions, including "Shigeru Ban: A Paper Arch," "Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles," and "Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect." Matilda is an accomplished author and editor on art, architecture, and design, with many books and articles to her credit, including Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (2002), Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles (1998), Architecture: A Place for Women (1989) and Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (2005).
Leital Molad
Leital Molad leads the production team as Senior Producer for PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, public radio's premier national program on arts and pop culture. In her time at Studio 360, Leital has worked as a producer, editor and reporter, and was the sound designer for the Peabody Award-winning episode American Icons: Moby-Dick. Leital came to New York from Austin, Texas in 1999 to study at NYU's Graduate School of Journalism and to break into the world of public radio.
Philip Nobel
Philip Nobel is the author of Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero (Metropolitan, 2005). His column, "Far Corner," appears monthly in Metropolis magazine and he regularly writes architectural criticism for The New York Times, Vogue, Artforum, The Forward, Architectural Digest and The Nation. Philip has also appeared as a commentator on CBS and MSNBC.
» Click here to read Nobel's essay titled Die Another Day
[www.metropolismag.com]
Phil Patton
Phil Patton is a contributing editor at Departures, Esquire, and I.D., a contributing writer at Wired and an automotive design writer for The New York Times. Phil was a regular contributor to The New York Times Home and Garden section and, in 1998, originated the "Public Eye" column. He has written many books including: Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things That Made America (Grove-Weidenfeld, 1992), which was named a New York Times notable book of the year; Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile (Simon & Schuster, 2002); Michael Graves Designs: The Art of the Everyday Object (Melcher, 2004); and Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 (Villard, 1998). He has also written for Art in America, ARTnews, Connoisseur, Geo, Harper's Bazaar, Men's Journal, The New Republic, New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, Traveler, The Village Voice and Vogue. Phil was the Editorial Consultant on the Guggenheim Museum's "Motorcycle" show in 1998 and Consulting Curator for the "Different Roads" exhibition at MoMA in 1999. In 2000 he was consultant and contributor for "On the Job: Design and the American Office" at the National Building Museum in Washington.
Karen Stein
Karen Stein is a writer, editor, and architectural consultant. From 1998 until June 2007, she was editorial director of Phaidon Press, a leading international publisher of books on architecture, art, design and photography, where she commissioned and developed some of Phaidon's flagship titles. Formerly, she was managing senior editor at Architectural Record. Karen is a member of the jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize, co-chair of the Architecture and Design Circle at the Museum of Modern Art, and a board member of the Architectural League of New York. Karen was the 1994-1995 Loeb Fellow in Environmental Studies at Harvard University and has received several awards for editorial excellence including the McGraw-Hill Companies Corporate Achievement Award and a special citation by the American Institute of Architects.
MFA DESIGN CRITICISM GUEST LECTURERS INCLUDE:
Eugenia Bell, design editor, Frieze
Gerry Beegan, design historian
Andrew Blauvelt, design director, Walker Art Center
Allan Chochinov, co-founder and editor, Core 77
Elyssa Dimant, fashion critic
Stuart Ewen, design historian
Rob Giampietro, designer and writer
Peter Hall, design journalist
Stuart Kendall, author and professor of foreign languages and humanities
Emily King, author, curator, and design historian
Pat Kirkham, design and cultural historian
Cathy Leff, director, Wolfsonian-FIU
Victor Margolin, design historian
Christopher Mount, curator
Kerry William Purcell, editor and design writer
Rick Poynor, author and design critic
Louise Schouwenberg, design critic
Matt Soar, associate editor, Design and Culture
Deyan Sudjic, director, Design Museum, London
Emily Weiner is the assistant to the chair of the Design Criticism MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts. After graduating from Barnard College in 2003 with a BA in Visual Arts, she moved briefly to Santiago, Chile, where she wrote for the cultural pages of the online English-speaking newspaper, The Santiago Times. In 2005, she joined the editorial staff of Time Out New York to write the magazine's weekly art listings, where she remained until arriving at the School of Visual Arts this past year. In addition to writing Art reviews in Time Out, Emily has published articles in ARTnews, MUSEO and The Visual Arts Journal.
» Click here to contact her directly with any questions about the D-Crit program