Denise Gonzales Crisp is Professor of Graphic Design, in the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where she served as Department Chair from 2002 to 2006. Prior to arriving at the college in Fall 2002, Gonzales Crisp was senior designer for Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and principal of the studio SuperStove! designing projects such as Artext magazine, Southern California Institute of Architecture lecture series, and books for independent presses. Her design and writing have been published internationally, including KAK (RU), Graphis, Émigré, Metropolis, Eye (UK), Print, and Items (NL) magazines, and in juried competitions such as ACD 100, Communication Arts, I.D., and Graphis. Her work was featured in the 2002 exhibition East Coast/West Coast Dreams, (Paris), in the 2005 anthology All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers, and the 2009 exhibition Dimension+Typography (Chicago). Juried and commissioned essays are included in Design and Culture Journal, Items Magazine, and Design Observer, plus Design Research, The Design Dictionary and several other anthology volumes.
Gonzales Crisp has lectured widely, and has been a featured speaker at TypeCon 2010 (Los Angeles), ATypI 2009 (Mexico City), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), GraficEurope (Berlin), RMIT (Melbourne), ArtCity (Calgary), and numerous colleges and universities including California Institute of the Arts, Yale, Parsons, Maryland Institute College of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Art Center, and California College of the Arts.
Teaching positions include core faculty in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a 12 year part-time appointment at Art Center in the undergraduate graphic design program. Additionally Gonzales Crisp has held regular part-time appointments at California Institute of the Arts and Otis Art Institute.
Her research areas include defining the DecoRational (a term she coined); defending and writing alternative design discourse; and most recently, a speculative project, “Tools That Make Type.” She is the author of Relational Typography: Systems, Context, Form, Message (working title), Thames & Hudson, Fall 2011. Additional current work includes co-curating an exhibition for the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), Raleigh, entitled Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern (September 2011), and creating new work for the exhibition Getting Upper, curated by Amos Klausner for the Pasadena Museum of California Art (May 2011).