Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
Established in 2017, the annual Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary spotlights individuals who best exemplify the tradition of prolific writing and boundless curiosity established by Steven Heller—who has contributed and inspired engaging commentary about design and culture for the past three decades.
Celebrates critical thinking about design and the profession, and encourages development in the next generation of design voices through a variety of media (i.e., curators, podcasters, filmmakers).
Nominations are now closed. Please check back for updates on future nomination cycles!
2022 Awards Selection Committee
- Chris Dingwall, Design Historian and Curator, Oakland University
- Sheharazad Fleming (Co-Chair), Director of Digital Design and Marketing, Office of L.A. City Mayor
- Karin Fong, Director + Designer, Imaginary Forces
- Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel (Co-Chair), Assistant Provost, Associate Professor and Program Director of MS Health Communication Design, Thomas Jefferson University
Advisors to the Committee (non-voting):
Nominations and Selection Criteria
AIGA Medalist Steven Heller has written more than 140 books on graphic design, illustration, and political art. As Paula Scher said of Steven, “the one common denominator of Heller's work is that the design and/or the designer is always the star. Heller maintains a journalistic narrative that allows the design and the designer to stand out. He is graphic design’s biggest fan.” Steven serves as Co-chair, MFA Design Department, School of Visual Arts; special assistant to the president, School of Visual Arts; co-founder, MFA Design Criticism, MPS Branding, MFA Interaction Design, MFA Products of Design, and Impact! Design for Social Change program with Mark Randall, all at the School of Visual Arts; contributing editor: Print, where he writes The Daily Heller, Eye, Baseline; contributing writer: Metropolis, Design Bureau, Design Observer, Port, IDPure; columnist, The New York Times Book Review. Earlier in his career he served as Senior art director, The New York Times Book Review.
Scher concluded her AIGA medalist essay about Steven by saying, “We easily take for granted our design history books, our magazines, and our conferences. We are accustomed now to seeing design work from all over the world and from any time in history without working terribly hard to find it. But before 1980, design books, magazines and design conferences were few and far between. Steven Heller has immortalized our graphic past and made coherence of our present. The debt that future graphic designers owe him simply cannot be calculated.”
Steven is married to 2014 AIGA Medalist Louise Fili, and resides in New York City.
AIGA members are invited to submit nominations to be considered by next year’s committee. To nominate a colleague, mentor, or individual whose writing or commentary has made a significant impact in the U.S., simply complete the nomination form. Including the name of the nominee, a short paragraph about why the individual should be considered, and a link to a writing sample with their byline or their website. Nominations are accepted on a rolling basis and are considered year after year for the next awards cycle. Each year, nominations for the Steven Heller Prize are reviewed by an awards committee of to verify eligibility. Yearly recommendations for the prize are then presented to the AIGA National Board of Directors for majority approval.
Individuals who are honored will have demonstrated breadth of their work or expertise in a specific area; shown diversity and range in their storytelling voice and the ability to be adaptive to established brands or delivery platforms; and using longform, short blogs, humor, or serious investigation, writers will have effectively conveyed ideas to engage their audience. The definition of writer may include, but is not limited to: book authors, editors, critics, reporters, copywriters, bloggers, podcasters, radio hosts, and filmmakers. Eligibility is limited to individuals who are citizens or current long-term residents of the United States.
Book author, editor, critic, reporter, copywriter, blogger, podcaster, radio/video content creators,
or filmmakers who:
- Have an original voice
- Demonstrate breadth in their work or expertise within their specific area of focus
- Show diversity and range in their storytelling
- Effectively convey ideas to engage their audience through the use of long-form, short blogs, humor or serious investigation
- Have published in the United States as a citizen or long-term resident
- Have shown a recent track record for content for at least 3 years (post-grad)
- Brave (i.e., analytical, authoritative, courageous, critical, individual, innovative, insightful, penetrating) bodies of work (embody Steven Heller)
- Diversity of background, age, culture, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
- Involvement with AIGA past, present, future
Nominations
Nominations Now Closed
Nominations are now closed. Please check back for updates on future nomination cycles!
Past Recipients
Johanna Drucker
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2021
Recognized for her prolific yet unpredictable work as a leading scholar of graphic design, print culture, and book history as well as her impact through graphic design history textbooks to shape students and welcome the next generation of designers.
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, aesthetics, and digital humanities. Her scholarly reputation was established with The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary, 1995) The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson, 1995), and The Visible Word (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Her creative work was the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, initiated by Columbia College in Chicago in 2012. Her artist’s books are represented in special collections in museums and libraries in North America and Europe. Her 1988 work, Bookscape, was featured in the “Artists and their Books” exhibit at the Getty Research Institute in summer 2018. In 2014, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent work includes Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity (The Elephants, 2018), and Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Pres, 2018). In 2019 she was in residence as the inaugural Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and has also been the recipient of Mellon, Fulbright, and Getty Fellowships. Recent publications include: Visualizing Interpretation (MIT, 2020), Iliazd: Metabiography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), and The Digital Humanities Coursebook (Routledge, 2021). Her work has been translated into Korean, Italian, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Danish and Portuguese.
Alissa Walker
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2021
Recognized for her writing on design and urbanism to promote design issues and thinking to a mass readership as well as her commentary on public transportation and walking to connect people with where they live
Alissa Walker is a writer and a walker in L.A. As the California correspondent at Curbed, she covers transportation, housing, urban design, and environmental policy for New York Magazine.
Over the past two decades, Alissa’s writing has appeared regularly in publications including Gizmodo, GOOD, Fast Company, Dwell, Design Observer, Los Angeles Magazine, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the co-founder of design east of La Brea, a nonprofit that received two National Endowment for the Arts grants supporting its L.A. design events. Alissa was named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2010, her work was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, and in 2015 she received the Design Advocate award from the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In 2019, she played herself on the traffic safety episode of the show Adam Ruins Everything, “Adam Ruins a Murder.”
Alissa lives in L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown neighborhood with her family, where she is a co-host of LA Podcast, an avid ice cream consumer, and a mom to the city's two most enthusiastic public transit riders.
Alexandra Lange
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2019
Alexandra Lange is the architecture critic for Curbed. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, MAS Context, Metropolis, and T Magazine, as well as in New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and The New York Times. She has been a featured writer in Design Observer and an Opinion columnist at Dezeen. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York University. She was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Her latest book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2018. She is also the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka, 2012), which considers the message of the physical spaces of Facebook, Google, and Apple, and co-author, with Jane Thompson, of Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle, 2010).
Ellen McGirt
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2019
Ellen McGirt is a senior editor at Fortune. In addition to long-form magazine features, she writes RaceAhead, an award-winning daily column on race and inclusion in corporate life and beyond. She is also the co-chair of Fortune’s CEO Initiative. In the past, she’s written for Time, Money, and Fast Company, where she wrote or contributed to more than twenty cover stories, and created the digital series the 30 Second MBA. Her reporting has taken her inside the C-Suites of Facebook, Nike, Twitter, Intel, Xerox, and Cisco; on the campaign trail with Barack Obama and across Africa with Bono to study breakthrough philanthropy. Ellen was the editor for Your First Leadership Job, a book published by Wiley in 2015. The New York City native attended Brown University and now lives in the Midwest with her family.
Allison Arieff
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2018
Allison Arieff is the editorial director of the Bay Area-based urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR. She’s written about architecture, design, and cities for numerous publications including California Sunday, the MIT Technology Review, Dialogue and City Lab. She’s been a contributing columnist to The New York Times since 2006; a former editor-at-large for GOOD and Sunset magazines; the senior content lead for IDEO from 2006–2008; and editor-in-chief and founding senior editor of Dwell until 2006. Dwell won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005 under her tenure.
Maurice Cherry
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2018
Maurice Cherry is a pioneering digital creator—a hybrid of writer, editor, producer, designer, and curator—who is best-known for the Black Weblog Awards, an online event that celebrates Black bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters. Other notable projects of Maurice’s include the award-winning podcast Revision Path and blog 28 Days of the Web. His storytelling projects, design work, and advocacy have been recognized by Apple, NPR, News One, AIGA, HOW, Print, The Dieline, Creative Market, Buffer, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Recently he was named by Graphic Design USA Magazine as one of their “People to Watch” for 2018.
Anne Quito
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2017
Anne Quito is Quartz’s design and architecture reporter. She covers a wide range of topics, from graphic design, corporate branding, and product design to workplace design and architecture. Anne has contributed essays to numerous design publications and her MFA thesis on the nation branding of the world’s newest country, South Sudan, was featured on NPR. She holds a master’s degree in visual culture from Georgetown University and an MFA in design criticism from the School of Visual Arts. Anne is also the founding director of Design Lab, an in-house design studio within an international humanitarian development organization. Read more about Anne from SVA and TED.
