2006 jury

Jessica Helfand, Chair

A graphic designer and educator, Jessica Helfand is a founding editor of Design Observer, currently the largest online forum for design commentary. She has been a contributing editor for PRINT, I.D. Magazine and Eye magazine and has written for numerous national publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The New Republic. A former writer for television, she is the author of Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), which later formed the basis for an exhibit at the Grolier Club in New York City in 2003.

Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen began his career writing on national affairs at Time, where he also spent eight years as the magazine’s architecture and design critic. He is a co-founder of Inside magazine, has been a columnist for The New Yorker and was editor-in-chief of Colors, New York and Spy magazines. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and Architectural Record. As a radio commentator, he has appeared on the Charlie Rose Show, CNN and MSNBC; since 2001, he has hosted Studio 360 on Public Radio International, carried by over 150 public radio stations nationwide. He is the author of the novel Turn of the Century (1999).

Julie Lasky

Editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine, Julie Lasky was previously the editor of Interiors and the managing editor at PRINT. During her tenure as editor of I.D. Magazine, the magazine has earned four consecutive National Magazine Award nominations. She is the recipient of a Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program fellowship; a Richard J. Margolis Award for journalism; and was a Journalism Scholar in 1995 at Northwestern University. Lasky’s essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The American Scholar and Forward. Her most recent book is Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (2001).

Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke is the culture editor at Slate and a poetry editor at Paris Review. Previously, she worked as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Her writing and poetry have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications. She is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.