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 open for the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary 2026 edition.
2025 Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary Recipients
Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes Miller
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2025
Dr. Cheryl D. Miller is a pioneering designer, author, theologian, and historian whose work has transformed the cultural narrative of design. Best known for her groundbreaking 1987 essay “Black Designers: Missing in Action,” she exposed systemic exclusion in the field and reshaped design education and discourse for generations. Through her New York–based firm, she advanced socially impactful communication for major corporations and national organizations during the post–Civil Rights era. Her recent books and scholarly contributions form a new, globally inclusive design historiography. With archives housed at Stanford and Cooper Union, Miller continues to advocate for design rooted in cultural impact, belonging, and restorative leadership.
Michele Washington
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2025
Michele Y. Washington is a multidisciplinary designer whose work spans design, curation, research, writing, and teaching. She has contributed to major museum projects, including MoMA’s Designer’s Choice: Norman Teague’s Jam Session and exhibitions at Poster House, and has collaborated with organizations such as BlackSpace Urban Collective, Coforma, and A Long Walk Home. Washington holds advanced degrees from SVA and Pratt and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A prolific writer and active board member across several cultural and design organizations, she also hosts the Curious Story Lab podcast. Her work centers community histories, Black cultural narratives, and inclusive design practices.
Robin Landa
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2025
Robin Landa is a distinguished professor at Kean University and a leading authority on creativity, branding, and design. Named by the Carnegie Foundation among the “Great Teachers of Our Time,” she is an award-winning educator and the author of twenty-five influential books, including Graphic Design Solutions, Advertising by Design, and Shareworthy. Her insights on branding and creativity have been featured in major media outlets, and she contributes regularly to Inc. and other publications. Landa has judged top design competitions, serves on The One Club for Creativity’s Education Board, and has mentored thousands of designers, shaping the future of creative practice through her teaching, writing, and leadership.
Past Recipients
Audrey Grace Bennett
Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary
2022
Recognized for her extensive career as an educator and international speaker, she is prolific in her writing and in her thinking, using her position and the power of her ideas—embedded in social justice and the future of education—to advance design theories and practices.
Audrey Bennett is a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She joined the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design faculty as a full professor with tenure in 2018. She was appointed as a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor in 2019. Previously she taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Bennett’s design research agenda diverges into theoretical and applied lines of inquiry that study “interactive aesthetics” to facilitate cross-cultural and multimodal communication to yield cognitive and behavioral changes toward equity and justice. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Image and Text (South Africa) and New Design Ideas (Azerbaijan) and a former member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, where she served as Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She holds an M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale University.
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.
2025 Awards Selection Committee
- Sheharazad Fleming, AIGA Awards Chair, President at Corita Art Center | The Great Discontent | WE MUST BE BOLD
- Reggie Tidwell, AIGA National Board, Partner at 40 Hearts
- Sean Adams, Dean Visual Art & Communication at ArtCenter College of Design, 2014 AIGA Medalist
- Lisa Maione, Principal/Designer at For Instance, a design studio | Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Kansas City Art Institute
- Jae-eun Chung, Creative Director at RAA (Ralph Appelbaum Associates)
- Rob Harrigan, Experience Design Lead at JP MorganChase
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 Now Open
We accept nominations on a rolling basis. Submit now the nominations for the AIGA Awards 2026.
