Speaker Biographies

Keynote Speaker
Paula Scher
Partner, Pentagram Design, Inc.

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and began her graphic design career as a record cover art director at both Atlantic and CBS Records in the 1970s. In 1984 she co-founded Koppel & Scher, and in 1991 she joined Pentagram as a partner.

Paula has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a wide range of clients. Drawing from what Tom Wolfe has called the "big closet" of art and design history, classic and pop iconography, literature, music and film, Paula creates images that speak to contemporary audiences with emotional impact and appeal. Three decades into her career, these images have come to be visually identified with the cultural life of New York City.

Paula is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and a past recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She has served on the national board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and in 2001 she was awarded the profession's highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. She holds an honorary doctorate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). She currently serves on the board of directors of The Public Theater, and in 2006 she was named to the Art Commission of the City of New York.

Her work has been exhibited all over the world and is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and the Bibliothique nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Her teaching career includes over two decades at the School of Visual Arts, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. In 2002 Princeton Architectural Press published her career monograph Make It Bigger.

Donna Ching
Partner, ChingFoster Designs

Donna Lee Ching began her career as a designer for advertising agencies and newspapers. She freelanced for Milton Glaser Inc. and subsequently began working for the international design firm Pentagram New York in 1989. As a senior designer, she created identities, packaging, annual reports and signage for clients who ranged from CBS, Pepsi Co. and International Paper to the World Cup, IBM and The Oprah. She founded ChingFoster in 1995 with D. Jonathan B. Foster which focuses on non profit clients. The scope of the firm's work encompasses identities, editorial, interactive and environmental design.

Alice Chung
Partner, Omnivore, Inc.

Alice Chung studied at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University where she received an undergraduate degree in biology and a Master's degree in health and social behavior. Her graduate work led her to pursue design studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a B.F.A. and a B.G.D. After school, she worked at 2x4 in New York for four years. Chung teaches undergraduate typography at Yale University School of Art, where she has also been a visiting critic.

In 2002, she founded Omnivore Inc. with Karen Hsu. Omnivore is a small design studio with a big appetite. Based in New York City, it focuses primarily on design for art, architecture, and cultural institutions, but nevertheless enjoys a wide range of other projects and collaborations.

Glen Cummings and Israel Kandarian
Designers, 2x4, Inc.

Glen Cummings is a graphic designer/art director based in New York. Cummings received a B.F.A. in graphic design from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale in 2002. He is currently an art director at 2x4, leading projects for clients such as MTV, Prada, Chanel, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts and the Muhammad Ali Center. His work has been published and acknowledged by the American Institute of Architects, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Interior Design Magazine, NY Times Magazine and his work has been exhibited by the AIGA and SF MoMA. Mr. Cummings was appointed lecturer in graphic design at Yale School of Art in 2002.

Israel Kandarian received his M.Arch from Princeton University, where he won the Howard Crosby Butler Fellowship, and his B.Arch with distinction from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he won the Thom Mayne Scholarship. Israel is a Senior Designer at 2x4 and previously worked in the architecture offices of Morphosis, George Yu Architects, and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis.

Known for intellectual content and explorations of rhetorical meaning, many of 2x4's projects explore the nature of design and are as much about the thinking process behind each work as the finished product. This ideology, based on an almost algorithmic approach, is the foundation for 2x4's pioneering model for design, one that makes process the product." (source SF MoMa). In 2006, 2x4 was awarded the National Design Award for Communications and has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, Eye and Idea Magazine. It is also is one of the design studios featured in the Apple Profiles.

Laurel Cantor
Director of Publications & Creative Strategy, Office of Communications

Laurel Masten Cantor graduated from Wesleyan University magna cum laude with a triple major in English, studio art and education as well as teaching certification K-12 in English and art. She began a career teaching both subjects in private and public schools, and earned the Degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (literature and art), also from Wesleyan.

For five years she worked with Connecticut's Center for Creative Youth (an interdisciplinary program for gifted and talented high school students in drama, dance, visual arts, creative writing and music). After working at the publishing house Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York City, Laurel joined Princeton University's Office of Communications, where she has worked for more than 20 years as a publications editor, designer and art director. Currently she manages a ten-person publications team and serves as creative director for many projects and campaigns.

Her interests include producing original art on paper and on silk, theatrical costuming and cake decorating, with her specialty being edible museum facsimiles. She also serves as a pro bono consultant to several neighboring non-profit organizations.

Joey Roth
Founder/Principal, Joey Roth Design Studio

Joey Roth studied industrial design theory and creative writing in Swarthmore. His work as an industrial designer is guided both by concerns of sustainability and a need to tell stories.

He has freelanced as a designer and a design writer and worked as a senior Designer for Brio Lighting LLC along with the company founders, engineers, and manufacturers, to develop an innovative, coherent design language for LED lighting products.

Since 2007, Roth has been working on building a brand around the Sorapot - his radically minimalist reinterpretation of the teapot, whereby he has transformed a common item into a piece of modern art. In keeping with his emphasis on sustainability, the Sorapot's glass and metal components are fully recyclable, unlike conventional teapots. He has also designed glass teacups to go with the Sorapot, a modern wireless "Plushy" mouse made of natural wool felt and laminated bamboo ply, and carry-on luggage reminiscent of the golden days of ocean liners, that attempts to articulate the lost romance of air travel.

Closing Speaker
Jonathan Harris
Founder, Number 27

Jonathan Harris was born in 1979 in Vermont and studied Computer Science at Princeton University. In 2004 he received Italy's Fabrica Fellowship from Benetton, to join 40 other young artists for a year's work in non-traditional art, near Venice. At Fabrica, Harris created the award-winning sites 10x10, which automatically chooses the top 100 words and pictures in the world every hour based on what's happening in the news, and WordCount, which presents the 88,000 most frequently used English words, arranged side by side as one very long sentence.

After Fabrica, Harris worked as the first design director of Daylife, a global news service. At Daylife he created Universe, an exploration of modern mythology which attempts to suggest new constellations for today's night sky. His other projects include We Feel Fine, which uses large-scale blog analysis to study human emotion; Lovelines, which explores human desire, Phylotaxis, which presents the intersection of science and culture; and justcurio.us, an anonymous question and answer system. In late 2006, Harris was commissioned by Yahoo! to create a Time Capsule, which was open for one month online, in ten languages, and whose contents were then projected for three consecutive nights onto the ancient canyon walls of the Jemez pueblo, in New Mexico.

He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where he combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling in his work to design systems that explore and explain the world.