Julie Lasky

Julie Lasky is a writer, editor and critic with a speciality in design and architecture. Most recently, she was the deputy editor of the New York Times’s weekly Home section, for which she continues to write a monthly column on new design called “The Details.” Prior to that, she was editor of Change Observer, a Rockefeller Foundation-funded channel of the critically acclaimed website Design Observer that focused on design and social innovation. From 2002 to 2009, she was editor-in-chief of I.D., the magazine of international product design, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in those years. From 1998 to 2001, she edited Interiors magazine, which she led to several national honors. She began her journalism career at Print, the graphic arts bimonthly.

A widely published writer, she is the author of the books Irving Harper: Works in Paper (Rizzoli), Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books) and Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle (Lars Müller). She co-authored, with Steven Heller, Borrowed Design: Use and Abuse of Historical Form (Wiley). Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Museum of Arts and Design, Jewish Museum and Holon Design Museum, as well as in publications by Rizzoli, Yale University Press, Phaidon, Monacelli, Thames & Hudson and Princeton Architectural Press.

Honors include a National Arts Journalism Program Fellowship at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and the Richard J. Margolis award for nonfiction based on her writings on the cultural life of wartime Sarajevo. She has been a member of the exhibitions committee of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, an instructor in the MFA programs in Design and Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, a regular juror of the National Magazine Awards, and a frequent speaker at international forums on subjects from voting machines to vintage paperbacks.

She holds a B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and did graduate study in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Publications

• Steve Heller and Julie Lasky, Borrowed Design: Use and Abuse of Historical Form, Wiley, 1993. ISBN 978-0471284406
• Julie Lasky, Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry, Chronicle Books, 2001. ISBN 978-0811823654.

External links

• Change Observer channel on Design Observer website.
• Laura Collins-Hughes, Editor Interview: Julie Lasky, Change Observer on the National Arts Journalism Program website.