Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, curator, and educator with a love of typography.She is currently director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MA. Ellen Lupton is referred to as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at MICA. Lupton is also the writer of many graphic designers’ introduction to Typography with the book ‘Thinking with Type’, which is currently in its third edition, also designed by Ellen. Some of Ellen’s other books about graphic design include ‘Design Is Storytelling’, ‘Graphic Design Thinking, Health Design Thinking’, and ‘Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers’. Ellen is also the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City since 1992.
Ellen Lupton was born a twin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. She was a self-professed “art girl” from a family of English teachers, her love of typography combined her love of writing and art. Lupton was a student of fine arts at Cooper Union College, where she discovered graphic design and the “expressive potential of typography”. Upon graduating, she was offered a position as a curator of the newly-founded Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. This position combined her interests in writing and design into her first curatorial position. Lupton took advantage of limited resources to visually construct the history of graphic design.
Ellen Lupton helped launch the MFA program for graphic design at the Maryland Institute of College of Art and has been serving as director of this program since 2003. Lupton is also the 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design curator in the U.S. She has been named the Curator Emerita at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC after 30 years in service.
Some of Lupton’s exhibitions included Herbery Bayer Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision. She has also contributed to various publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis as well as essays and illustrations in the New York Times. Ellen Lupton was involved in co-writing D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself with graduate students from MICA, showcasing ordinary people and new ways to design their own work, from book covers to blog pages, explaining the design process to a general audience. She was also co-authored a book with her twin sister, Julia Lipton, named D.I.Y. Kids (2007), a design book for children illustrated with children’s art.