Anne Quito is a journalist and a design critic. Her beat tracks the surprising ways designers shape culture—from making legible fonts, ergonomic chairs, mood-altering scents, cooler cities, to designing a brand new nation from scratch. She is the first recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary.
A former staff reporter at Quartz, Anne’s writing also appears in The Atlantic, CNN, Architectural Digest, Town and Country, Metropolis, Design Observer, Works That Work, A24, Eye on Design, and other publications.
She wrote the book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines (Columbia University Press, 2019), a chronicle of the glory days of magazine design as told by Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard. Anne is among the hosts of Print is Dead. Long Live Print!, a podcast devoted to the legends of magazine publishing.
An experienced speaker and lecturer, Anne gave the commencement address at the Parsons School of Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology in 2022. She has presented at the Harvard School of Design, AIGA, the Type Directors Club, Adobe, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and TED Global; she been a guest commentator on the BBC, CBC Radio, and Monocle.
Anne has served as a moderator at several conferences and events including SxSW,, Amazon’s Conflux, Herman Miller, Collision, Pictoplasma, Copenhagen’s TechBBQ, IAM Weekend, the Van Alen Institute, the AIA New York-Center for Architecture, and Turncoats, a debate series about architecture that began in London.
Anne graduated from Georgetown University in 2009 and is an alumna of the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism MFA where she developed a thesis about the nation branding of South Sudan, the world’s newest country. She currently teaches a course in non-Western design history at the School of Visual Arts MFA in Products of Design program and conducts a critical media studies workshop at the ELISAVA Master in Design for Responsible AI program in Barcelona.
She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, AICA) and the North American Vexillological Association.
Anne is currently working on the biography of Milton Glaser.
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🚀 Bylines 📕 Book 💬 Speaking 🥊 Moderating 🦪 Stretch assignment