Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton (born 1963) is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. 

She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.

After graduating, Lupton was offered a position as curator of the newly-founded Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. This combined her long-standing interests in writing and design in her first curatorial position. With interest in the do-it-yourself movement, Lupton took advantage of limited resources to visually construct the history of graphic design, surprising peers with her ability to meld the visual and verbal.

These exhibits provided an arena in which "objects, images, and text functioned as both the method of communication and the subject of inquiry." At this time, Lupton began to write critically about typography and design, utilizing a post-structuralist framework to understand how design is embedded in political, economic, and social contexts, saying, "Typography and architecture are not neutral containers for the content or programs they are thought to accommodate neatly. These are fundamental insights of modern and post-modern thinking." She has cited Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault as informing her (albeit more populist) work.

In 1992, Lupton joined Cooper Hewitt as curator of contemporary design and began writing books about the design world. She ended her tenure as a curator in 2022 and received the honorary designation of curator emerita. In 1997, Lupton became a chair of the undergraduate graphic design program at MICA. She served in this role until 2002. In 2003, she launched a new MFA program in graphic design at MICA and has served as the director of that program ever since.