Artist of the day, May 1: Ellen Lupton, American graphic designer, writer, curator, and educator

Ellen Lupton (1963) is a graphic designer, writer, curator, and educator. Well known for her fascination and study within typography, Lupton decided to expand her love for design and took on the graphic design world. Lupton is the curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City and is the director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.

Like so many other design legends that came of age in the era of “commercial art,” Lupton was not aware of design as a viable field of study before college. It wasn't until she began as a fine art student at Cooper Union in 1981 that she discovered the expressive potential of typography. The visual art of writing was an inspiration to a self-professed “art girl” who came from a family of English teachers. Realizing the potential for an expanded critical discourse in graphic design provoked a shift in her ambitions.

In the mid-1980s Lupton founded the Design Writing Research lab with partner J. Abbott Miller as a so-called “after school” supplement to their early working lives. “We were young and had theories,” she says, “so we created DWR as a thing where we could take on work with clients and do artsy-fartsy stuff for the real world.” The fledgling studio provided the ideal climate for the kind of seamless integration between theory and practice that would characterize the scope of Lupton's career. Ideas from the Design Writing Research studio and early curatorial explorations at the Lubalin Center formed the basis for Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design, co-authored and designed by Lupton and Miller in 1996. The Lupton/Miller partnership has yielded many accomplishments, both professionally and personally, from the Chrysler Design Award in 1993 to the ultimate collaboration: their two children, Ruby and Jay.

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