Ellen Lupton

Author, Design Is Storytelling Curator, Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Ellen Lupton has been cited as one of America’s “design legends” by AIGA, the professional association for design. A writer and designer herself, she is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and director of the MFA program in graphic design at Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, where she also heads the Center for Design Thinking.

She has spoken at TED and lectured at numerous schools and universities, including Princeton, Yale, Cranbrook, the University of Michigan and the MIT Media Lab. Among her books are the 2004 classic Thinking with Type and the forthcoming Design Is Storytelling, a “playbook for creative thinking” devoted to showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to make their work more satisfying—a subject she will expand upon in the