Visiting Artist Colloquium: Cynthia Lawson

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based Colombian digital artist, technologist, and educator. She is Dean of the School of Design Strategies, Associate Dean of Parsons, and Associate Professor of Integrated Design. She has held a variety of leadership roles at The New School including, most recently, Interim Vice President and Associate Provost for Open Campus. An academic-activist at heart, she has collaborated on important boundary-crossing university initiatives including, most recently, the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Business Design for Social Impact non-credit certificate.

An internationally exhibited artist, Lawson’s current research focuses on the Parsons DEED Research Lab, which she co-founded in 2007 and currently directs. DEED Lab brings together students, faculty, and external partners from business, design, development, and policy to model more equitable ways for designers to work with artisans, and for artisans to sustain their livelihoods. Lawson has lectured internationally on design, education, technology, and social practice, including keynote talks at the Global Fashion Conference in Madrid and the Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales; and a TEDx talk on redesigning education. Prior to Parsons, she worked as an educational technologist in Bogotá and at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. She is an active member of the design education networks of AIGA and the Future of Design in Higher Education, and a co-organizer of the annual conference Digitally Engaged Learning. As a consultant she has worked with international organizations such as CARE and the World Bank.

Lawson received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Master’s in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s ITP. The daughter of expats, she was raised in five different cities in Latin America and abroad, and now lives in possibly the smallest neighborhood in Brooklyn—Greenwood Heights. cynthialawson.com