Bio

Louise Sandhaus is current faculty and former Program Director of the Graphic Design Program. She is the founder and co-director of The People’s Graphic Design Archive, a crowd-sourced virtual archive intended to preserve, expand, and diversify graphic design history. Her book on California graphic design, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires and Riots: California and Graphic Design 1936-1986, published in late 2014 by Metropolis Books and Thames & Hudson, received laudatory attention from The New York Times, The Guardian (London), and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others. In 2015, the book received the Palm D’argent from The International Art Book and Film Festival (FILAF). Her book on the prolific designer, Gere Kavanaugh, co-written and designed with Kat Catmur was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2019. Louise's work, writing, and writing about her work, have appeared in numerous publications including California: Designing Freedom, The Women of Design, Information Design Handbook, as well as SEGD journal, Eye, I.D., Metropolis magazines and her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Louise is a current Letterform Archive board member, former AIGA board member and former Chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community steering committee, an AIGA LA Fellow, and in 2017 received the Design Icon Award from Los Angeles Design Festival. She received an MFA in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts and a Graduate Laureate from the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in The Netherlands. In 2022 she received the AIGA Medal.