Denise Gonzales Crisp is a designer, writer, educator, curator, and author of Graphic Design in Context: Typography (Thames&Hudson, 2012). She is Professor of Graphic Design in the Department of Graphic and Industrial Design, College of Design, North Carolina State University, and is the Director of the Master of Graphic Design (MGD) program. Denise arrived at NC State in 2002 to serve as Department Chair. Prior to this appointment, Denise was the Senior Designer at Art Center College of Design, and a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts masters program.
Her work and writing are widely published, with commissioned essays and interviews in European publications such as Eye Magazine, Items, and Book 2.0 Journal, and US publications including Emigré, Design Observer, Print, and Metropolis; and books such as Design Research, The Designer as Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator, and Collaborator, Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011), Design Dictionary, and All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers. Denise has presented, given keynote addresses, or conducted workshops at Unfrozen (Brienz, SZ) FastForward (Dublin, IR), Spaces of Learning (Toronto, CN), TypoSF (San Francisco, US), ATypI (Mexico City, MX), Walker Art Center InSights speaker series (Minneapolis, US), GraficEurope (Berlin, DE), ArtCity (Calgary, CN), and at many national AIGA conferences and educational institutions across the US and abroad.
Her expertise and interests in typography, typographic education, typographic tools, and Graphic Design (The Discipline), are fodder for her design writing. The DecoRational (a term she coined) was the basis for the exhibition Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, co-curated with Susan Yelavich. Denise sits on the editorial board of Design and Culture journal, and is a working member on the board of DesignInquiry, a non-profit organization devoted to researching design issues in intensive team-based gatherings.