Announcing the Fall 2022 Lecture Series
We are delighted to announce our Visiting Lecture Series lineup for the Fall 2022 season. (See all of our department guest lecturers here.) Read more below about Amy Whitaker, Cliff Kuang, Marquise Stillwell, and Cloé Cooper Joes below!
Marquise Stillwell
Marquise Stillwell, the founder and principal of Openbox, created a company that represents a culmination of more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing fresh models for businesses and cultural organizations. The Openbox vision is, above all, human-centered: focusing on improving the lives of people in the communities its clients serve, whether it is through a film project; extensive business design work; or its deep resources for design research and innovation. Marquise also brings his passion for supporting diverse cultures and bringing about positive change to his many philanthropic and creative activities, from teaching with two Danish design schools: CIID in Copenhagen and the KaosPilot in Aarhus; to co-founding the magazine Deem Journal, focused on design and social practice; and also collaborating with his Openbox colleague Petter Ringbom on various films including Shield and Spear (2014) and The New Bauhaus (2019).
Amy Whitaker
Amy Whitaker was a founding member of the faculty in SVA's MFA in Products of Design where she taught Business Structures. She is currently an Associate Professor at New York University in the Steinhardt School’s department of art and art professions. She teaches business to artists, art to businesspeople, and economics to arts managers. She started her career in art museums including the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Tate. She also holds a PhD in political economy, an MFA in painting, and an MBA. Amy is the author of three books: Museum Legs (Hol Art Books), Art Thinking (HarperCollins), and Economics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market Resistance (Cambridge). Her work has received the Sarah Verdone Award for writing, the Edith Penrose Award for “trailblazing” research, and the Axiom Silver Medal for best business book of the year. Her newest book, The Story of NFTs: Art, Technology, and Democracy, co-authored with Nora Burnett Abrams, will be published by Rizzoli in February 2023. One of the earliest blockchain researchers in the arts, her work has been cited in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Guardian, Financial Times, Time, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, among others.
Cliff Kuang
Cliff Kuang is a user-experience designer at Google and author of ‘User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play’ which was called a “tour de force” by the New York Times and was also named an Amazon Best Book of 2019. Previously, he was head of UX and product at Fast Company; the founder of Fast Company’s design site, Co.Design; and an editor at Wired. Under his leadership, Co.Design became an award-winning source of insight and inspiration for a generation of designers.
Chloé Cooper Jones
Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer based in New York City. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for “Fearing for His Life,” a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She was the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the 2021 Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University. Both grants supported her latest book, Easy Beauty, a memoir which finds the author—after unexpectedly becoming a mother—embarking on a journey across the globe to reclaim the spaces, both physical and emotional, that she’d been denied and denied herself.