One of the world's leading art and design colleges, where making, thinking and craft have been inseparable since 1877.
12 professors and academic leaders celebrated so far, cited on every card. A small, growing selection, not a roster of the faculty. In pursuit of every professor, everywhere.
President
Office of the President
Thank you for bringing a poet's voice to the presidency of RISD and for championing the transformational power of creative education with such conviction and clarity.
Professor of Graphic Design
Graphic Design
Thank you for the techno-cubist posters you and Tom Wedell built between design and photography, now in MoMA and the Met, and for teaching students that type and image are one material.
Senior Critic, Graphic Design
Graphic Design
Thank you for a lifetime of collaged, three-dimensional images made with Nancy Skolos that dissolved the border between photography and design, and for the generous eye you bring to every critique.
Professor of Painting
Painting
Thank you for the black-and-white paintings on linen and glass that carry Meskwaki storytelling into museum collections like the National Museum of the American Indian, and for thirty years of teaching painters at RISD.
Professor of Painting
Painting
Thank you for paintings that imagine joyous, non-hierarchical ways of being in a fearful world, and for bringing that same openness to every studio you teach.
Professor of Painting
Painting
Thank you for four decades of painting and teaching at RISD since 1984, recognized with the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching, and for showing students what a long, honest studio life looks like.
Professor of Architecture
Architecture
Thank you for The Storm of Creativity, now translated around the world, and for the buildings of 3SIXO Architecture that prove your teaching about making and material is also how you practice.
Professor, Graphic Design
Graphic Design
Thank you for founding Queer.Archive.Work as a free community reading room and publishing studio in Providence, and for the Library of the Printed Web that MoMA now keeps for all of us.
Professor, Glass
Glass
Thank you for treating molten glass as a way to record light, sound and action, and for the live events from Corning to Korea that make the material feel newly alive.
Pevaroff-Cohn Family Chair in Textiles and Graduate Program Director
Textiles
Thank you for carrying textile design from beautiful interiors to acoustic fabrics published in Nature with MIT colleagues, and for stepping up to serve RISD as interim provost when the school needed you.
Professor
Literary Arts and Studies
Thank you for six collections of poems and for teaching visual, sonic and digital poetics at an art school, where words get to behave like material too.
Professor
Photography
Thank you for more than 35 books, from Racing Days to the Black and White Photography texts that taught hundreds of thousands of students to see, and for still shooting what you love.
This directory is unbounded, in pursuit of every professor at every university, everywhere. Every person is real, public, and cited; anyone featured can ask to be updated or removed.
If you are on this page and would rather not be, write to that address and say so. No account, no form, no one will ask you to reconsider, and we will not put you back.
A celebration of the faculty and academic leaders of Rhode Island School of Design, assembled entirely from public information as an act of credit and gratitude. It is not a claim of endorsement, affiliation, sponsorship, or partnership by anyone featured or by the university. Every person is real and publicly documented, with a cited source of truth on their card; we never invent a person or a claim, and we prize accuracy over speed. Anyone featured can ask to be updated or removed at any time. Names and marks belong to their owners.