William Drenttel works in partnership with Jessica Helfand at Winterhouse, a studio focusing on publishing, new media and cultural institutions. Drenttel is a founding editor of Design Observer, the largest weblog of design and cultural criticism; a co-editor of Below the Fold:, a journal of visual culture published by Winterhouse; and the co-founder of the AIGA Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism, a $5000 yearly prize. In 2006, Drenttel launched the Polling Place Photo Project, a national initiative to photograph the voting process in America.
Drenttel is president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU and a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He is a co-editor of four volumes of Looking Closer anthologies, the widely taught series of writings on graphic design. He is a former board member of Lingua Franca and Poetry Society of America, and has lectured at the Library of Congress, Walker Art Center, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Cranbrook Academy, and two national AIGA conferences, among many others.
Drenttel received a B.A. in Film and European Cultural Studies from Princeton University.
