Dr. Mariana Amatullo

Vice President, Designmatters
www.designmattersatartcenter.org

Biography

Mariana Amatullo is the vice president of Designmatters, ArtCenter’s award-winning social impact department. Since co-founding Designmatters in 2001, and later expanding it into a graduate and undergraduate department, she has helped conceptualize and manage a portfolio of global educational design projects, research collaborations and publications at the intersection of art, design and social innovation.

Through her leadership, ArtCenter became the first design institution to be affiliated as a nongovernmental organization with the United Nations and formally accredited with organizations such as the Organization of American States, the Pan American Health Organization and the United Nations Population Fund. Amatullo has been responsible for ArtCenter’s fundraising strategy in the domain of design for social innovation, developing funded educational partnerships and grants with entities such as the National Endowment for the Arts, VentureWell, Surdna Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey and Ashoka.

Amatullo is the recipient of numerous design and social innovation honors, among them the 2012 Dell Social Innovation Education award, Fast Company’s Co.Design “50 Designers Shaping the Future” and the Public Interest Design 100. She serves on a variety of advisory and executive boards of organizations engaged in the arts, design education and social innovation, including Ideo.org, the DESIS Network, the University of Southern California’s International Museum Institute and the Cumulus International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media.

Amatullo is a scholar-in-residence and design and innovation fellow at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, where she received a PhD in management (designing sustainable systems). She has an MA in art history and museum studies from the University of Southern California and a licence en lettres degree from the Paris-Sorbonne University, and she also studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre.