BIOS

LONG: 395 WORDS

One of the leading designers in America, Jessica Helfand works in partnership with William Drenttel at Winterhouse Studio, a design collaborative in New England focusing on publishing projects and new media. Selected clients include filmmaker Errol Morris, The Paris Review, University of Chicago Press, American Masters/PBS and the National Design Awards.

Prior to co-founding Winterhouse, Helfand was an award-winning editorial and interaction designer, whose clients included The New York Times, Newsweek, The Times of London and the Discovery Channel.

Helfand is one of the four founding editors of Design Observer, currently the largest international weblog of design and cultural criticism, with over 800,000 site visits a month. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines, she has written for numerous national publications including Aperture, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The New Republic, and has twice appeared on National Public Radio. A member of the Writers Guild of America for more than two decades, Helfand was previously part of the CBS-TV "Guiding Light" writing team that won an Emmy Award for best writing in 1985.

She is the author of several books on design and cultural criticism, including Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), which formed the basis for an exhibit in 2003 at The Grolier Club in New York City. Her next book, Scrapbooks: An American History will be published in October of 2008.

Helfand has been a visiting critic at numerous programs in design and architecture throughout the United States and Europe and has lectured at the Netherlands Design Institute, the Walker Art Center, Smithsonian Institution and the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, among others. She has taught for the last decade in the graduate program in Graphic Design at Yale University, where she is a Fellow at Jonathan Edwards College and a member of the committee on graduate admissions in the School of Art. She has also taught at The Cooper Union and New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Jessica Helfand received a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design and Architectural Theory and a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, both from Yale University. She lives in Falls Village, Connecticut, with her husband, William Drenttel and their two children, Malcolm and Fiona.