Breaking the Rules | Biographies

Darren Aronofsky is a film director, screenwriter and producer.  He directed The Wrestler (2008) starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, which won the Golden Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival, two Golden Globe Awards, and received two Academy Award nominations.  His former projects include Requiem for a Dream (2000), Below (2002), and The Fountain (2006).   Future projects include RoboCop and The Fighter.  Aronofsky was born in Brooklyn, NY and graduated from Edward R. Murrow High School.  He studied anthropology, and film at Harvard.  His senior thesis film, Supermarket Sweep, was a finalist in the 1991 Student Academy Awards.

Nancy Bannon is a dancer and performance artist.  She created The Pod Project, a performance/installation consisting of thirteen 3-minute private performances housed within sculptured spaces.  Inspired by an elevator experience, the viewer actually enters each performance environment for a one-on-one exchange in unconventional proximity.  Bannon received her BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School where she received The Martha Hill Prize and a Princess Grace Award. Following Juilliard, she joined the Doug Varone dance company.  From 1993 – 2000, she was featured in Varone’s repertoire, taught and directed. She also has collaborated and danced with Tere O’Connor Dance and Lar Lubavitch.  Bannon’s work has been presented at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Movement Research at Judson Church, the 92nd Street Y, BAX, Joyce and many universities. She has led master classes for The Jose Limon Dance Company, Metropolitan Opera Ballet, NYU, Juilliard, SUNY Purchase, among others, she is active as a writer and actor in Naked Angel’s cold reading series.

Erin Belieu was born and raised in Nebraska and studied poetry at The Ohio State University and Boston University. For several years she was the poetry editor at AGNI magazine and was the founding editor of Hotel Amerika. Belieu's books include Infanta, which was selected for The National Poetry Series in 1995 and was chosen as one of the best books for that year by Library Journal and The Washington Post; One Above & One Below, from which poems were chosen for The Best American Poetry in 2001, and Black Box, which was recently a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. All of her poetry collections are published by Copper Canyon Press. Belieu is also the co-editor of The Extraordinary Tide, the first comprehensive anthology of contemporary American women's poetry, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2001. Belieu's poems have appeared in places such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She presently lives in Tallahassee with her 7 year old son, the most estimable Jude Countryman, and teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.

Valerie Casey leads the digital experience practice at IDEO, where she provides strategic leadership for client relationships. Valerie works with organizations around the world to design products, services, and business models that create positive social and environmental impact. She specializes in helping companies and other organizations understand, shape, and ultimately capitalize on their internal and external networks to address cultural, economic, social, and environmental challenges with greater agility.

Casey founded the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, corporate leaders, and educational institutions focused on integrating sustainability into all practice and production. More than 150,000 designers and organizations worldwide now participate in the Designers Accord.

Prior to IDEO, Valerie was Executive Creative Director at frog design, where she led the global design research and design strategy practices. Previously, Casey was an Associate Partner at Pentagram Design, where she built the interaction design practice in San Francisco. She has also worked as an Associate Creative Director at vivid studios.

Casey’s work has been highlighted in multiple publications, and in 2008, she was named a Fast Company “Master of Design” and a Fortune magazine “Guru You Should Know.” She lectures on design throughout the international community, and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a master’s degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and a BA from Swarthmore College.

Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  She designed the public tour experience as well as programs, strategic partnerships and products to position the Glass House as a catalyst for inspiration and innovation.  She is project director and producer for Glass House Conversations and the Glass House Oral History Project.

Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.  While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she envisioned and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions.  She produced numerous international conferences and tours, including Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). As the former Program Director for AIGA, the professional association for design, she produced national conferences on design and business and envisioned and repositioned the International Design Conference at Aspen to the change and advocacy-focused Aspen Design Summit and Aspen Design Challenge.

Jeff Gordinier is the author of X Saves the World, published in 2008 and released in paperback in 2009. Gordinier is the Editor-at-Large at Details magazine. He graduated from Princeton University and he has written for a variety of word-oriented entities, including Esquire, GQ, Fortune, Spin, Elle, Breathe , the Los Angeles Times, Cookie, Crawdaddy , the Offsprung parenting site, PoetryFoundation.org, and Entertainment Weekly. In 2006 he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for two music stories in Details, and in 2007 he won a second award of special recognition from ASCAP for another Details piece. His work has been published in anthologies such as Best American Non-required Reading 2005, Best Food Writing 2006, and Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 1.

Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House.  She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center to open to the public in June 2007.  With the goal to "reshape the historic house museum model", MacLear and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2009, completed a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a "center for Modernism" to co-lead the National Trust's investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the "conversations" series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site. 

MacLear is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large-scale projects through opening and on-going operations.  She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company's new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE.  She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship.  She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago's Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.  

Geoff Manaugh is the author of BLDGBLOG http://bldgblog.blogspot.com and contributing editor at Dwell. He has been called "the world's greatest living practitioner of 'architecture fiction'" by Bruce Sterling and is considered one of the most influential writers in his field today by Icon magazine. The BLDGBLOG Book is forthcoming from Chronicle Books in summer 2009."

Chef Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute and The Italian Culinary Academy, both of which reside in New York City’s International Culinary Center. Chef Nils is the embodiment of the new international chef: disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity.

Previously he served as Executive Chef for Aquavit. During his tenure there, Chef Nils helped to demonstrate to the world the fine tastes and techniques of Swedish cooking. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden, Chef Nils also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin.

Alan Richman is the author of Fork it Over and, since 1986, has been the food and wine critic for GQ.  Richman is the recipient of twelve James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for food writing, including the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award twice, and is also the first food writer to have received a National Magazine Award. Richman is Dean of Food Journalism at the French Culinary Institute.  Richman served in the U.S. Army in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star.

Katie Salen is a Professor in the Design and Technology Program, Parsons The New School for Design, the Director of the Center for Transformative Media at The New School, Executive Director of the Institute of Play, and co-editor of the International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press). She is co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader, and The Ecology of Games: Connecting Digital Youth and Learning, all from MIT Press. Katie worked as an animator on Richard Linklater’s critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life and recently co-developed Karaoke Ice, an ice-cream truck turned mobile karaoke unit deployed to collect and curate idiosyncratic performances of tinkle-pop songs.

Salen designs big games, slow games, and game-like experiences for audiences of all types and is currently working for Gamelab on a multiplayer online game to teach kids game design, called Gamestar Mechanic. Katie spends much of her time gaming on trains and planes in lieu of single serving meals.

For over three decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher has been a principal in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970’s and early 80’s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of classic American brands.

Scher has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, Perry Ellis, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, the Robin Hood Foundation and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. She is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and other publications. In 2006 she was named to the Art Commission of the City of New York.

In 1998, Scher was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2000 she received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She has served on the national board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and was president of its New York chapter from 1998 to 2000. In 2001 she received the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal. In 2006 she was awarded the Type Directors Club Medal. She is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; the Denver Art Museum; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

She has authored numerous articles on design-related subjects for the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Print, Graphis and other publications, and in 2002 Princeton Architectural Press published her career monograph Make It Bigger.

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