Bio

Tanner Woodford is founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. As an artist, he paints optimistic, typographic, and larger-than-life murals. His work has appeared at the WNDR Museum, Soho House Chicago, and is permanently installed at Weber Shandwick in the John Hancock Building. In 2020, Tanner was appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot to the City of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council. As a designer, educator, and entrepreneur, he has taught, lectured, and led workshops on design issues, social change, and design history in classrooms and at conferences. Tanner received a Bachelor of Science in Design from Arizona State University in 2009, and returned to teach in 2010. More recently, he teaches Design Thinking For Social Change at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is happy to be scrappy, irrepressibly optimistic, and believes design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition.