Jeanne Criscola is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. Her artwork reveals the content and context of information and effectively communicates them in graphical form with the devices of human culture, technology, language, and other symbols.

As principal of Criscola Design, LLC, Jeanne Criscola and her studio have approached design as a Fluxus-inspired relationship of concept, client, and craft, working with the computer as a design-making tool. The practice is aligned with semiotics and message-making to convey a variety of ideas, including ideas about human rights and censorship. The mediums employed are typography and images in computer and environmental graphics and time-based media. Like their clients, the studio, too, is concerned with social activism and conceptual engagement in a globalized society. The work takes the form of posters and websites (National Coalition Against Censorship), publications (Soros Foundations), installations (Revenue Watch Institute, Vera Institute of Justice) and time-based media. Their work is not always exhibited conventionally—for example, in a gallery or museum—because they create objects and experiences for specific purposes and organizations. What all the design work has in common is the representation of the evolving human condition through images, typography, color, and form in relation to concepts, exploring political and social implications, cultural messages, change, struggle, place, time, solutions, and shifting concerns. Criscola Design strives to simplify content to make it understandable, interesting, and unique in perspective.

The studio’s books, annual reports, brochures, magazines, calendars, and other materials have won numerous prestigious awards. Jeanne Criscola and Criscola Design have won several graphic design awards, including the Health Public Relations and Marketing News Best Public Relations Campaign Award for Now I Know Better: Kids Tell Kids About Safety (1996); Council on Advancement and Support for Education Regional Award for Excellence in Design (1995); the Council on Foundations Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for Excellence in Communications Silver Award (1994 for Children of Atlantis and 1995 for Dear Unknown Friend: Children’s Letters from Sarajevo, Soros Foundations); and a 1994 Second Place Award for Exhibition Catalogues from the American Association of Museums for Conservation by Design, an exhibition catalog and book of essays for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and Woodworkers Alliance for Rainforest Protection. In 2003, two publications for The Soros Foundations Network/Open Society Institute won awards from the Council on Foundations in its annual Wilmer Shields Rich competition for excellence in communications. The Network Women’s Program book, Bending the Bow: Targeting Women’s Human Rights, won a Silver Award in the Special Reports category and was praised as a “strong and compelling publication,” “a pleasure to look at.” Building the New South Africa, which tells the story of the Open Society Institute’s grantee Nurcha, was praised as “visually captivating.” In 2005, a visual campaign created for the Revenue Watch Institute won a Silver Award in the Public Policy Campaign category for revenuewatch.org and the 2003–2004 Annual Report produced for U.S. Programs/Soros Foundations won a Silver Award from the Council on Foundations in its annual Wilmer Shields Rich competition for excellence in communications. The judges praised the Annual Report “for its effective, well-organized structure” and its “‘visually rich’ images and layout.”

Practicing graphic design since 1980 has required Criscola to be a perpetual student with a toolbox that lies in the ever-changing landscape of computer hard- and software—a place where possessing a natural affinity to technology is a prerequisite and patience and sheer determination are a must. With over 20 years of design, art, and teaching experience acquired, Criscola hopes to in turn foster an innovative environment for the study of media, culture, and technology and to engage her clients and students to become active participants in and contributors to contemporary culture. She encourages all to be able and willing to reflect, critic, debate, and rethink the society and world in which they find themselves living.

Jeanne Criscola holds a MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute, Donau-Universität Krems and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA).

For a portfolio of selected commercial design work, visit www.criscoladesign.com

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