2024 Kusske Lecture & Dialogue: Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1994 and is the Museum’s senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, as well as MoMA’s founding director of research and development. Her work investigates design in all its forms, from architecture to video games, often expanding its reach to include overlooked objects and practices. Her exhibitions, lectures, and writings contemplate design’s intersection and interaction with other fields (from technology and biology to popular culture) and with life—that of individuals, communities, all species, and all planets. Her goal is to promote people’s understanding of design, until its positive influence on the world is universally acknowledged. 

An architect trained at the Polytechnic of Milan and a pasionaria of design, Antonelli has been named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries in the world by TIME magazine, has earned the Smithsonian Institution’s Design Mind National Design Award, has been inducted in the US Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and has received the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) gold medal, the Compasso d’Oro from the Italian Association for Industrial Design, the London Design Medal, and the German Design Award, among other accolades. 

Antonelli has curated shows at MoMA and in other international institutions, lectured worldwide in conferences ranging from TED to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and written copious essays and books. Following, among others, the 2019 XXII Triennale di Milano Broken Nature, devoted to the idea of restorative design, and the MoMA exhibitions Never Alone (2022, on video games and other interactive design) and Life Cycles (2023, on the materials of contemporary design), Paola is currently working on Design Emergency––the podcast and Instagram project she co-founded with Alice Rawsthorn in 2020 to highlight design’s role as key toward building a better future for all––and producing her renowned MoMA R&D Salons—thematic gatherings demonstrating the potential of museums as R&D departments for society.

Prasad Boradkar is an educator, researcher, and designer with several years of experience leading design and research teams in both academia and industry. Before joining the University of Minnesota as dean of the College of Design, he served as UX Research and Sustainability Lead at Google’s Advanced Technology & Projects division, where he led efforts on user experience research and sustainable development for health and wellness products.

Prior to his work at Google, he was a professor of industrial design at Arizona State University, where he also served as co-director of the Biomimicry Center and director of the InnovationSpace transdisciplinary research and education lab. Throughout his career, Dr. Boradkar has led and worked in cross-functional, transdisciplinary teams that included engineers, architects, biologists, sustainability experts, business specialists, social scientists, and many others.

Emily Beverly is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Her research group studies interactions between humans and their environment on a variety of temporal and spatial scales. One of Dr. Beverly’s long-term research goals is to understand the context in which organisms (especially humans) lived and the effects on their evolution and adaptation to their environment. More recently, she has focused on time periods in the earth’s past which are good analogs for anthropogenic climate change. Dr. Beverly has active field projects in Kenya and Tanzania, and has recently begun a project on the Eocene of western North America. 

Marek Oziewicz is a Polish-born scholar of literature and story systems as sociocognitive technologies for personal empowerment and social transformation. Marek is a professor of literacy education and holds the Sidney and Marguerite Henry Professorship of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research explores the deep grammar and design principles of story systems, especially in literature and media for young audiences, focusing on how stories boost young people’s justice literacies, cognitive capacity, and impact on the world. Marek believes that humanity’s greatest challenge today is a transition to an ecological civilization. He serves as Director of the Center for Climate Literacy because he considers education as ground zero for building universal climate literacy and ushering in a just, sustainable world in which human and nonhuman lives can reach their full potential.