Biography

William Drenttel is a designer, publisher and design leader. Bill works in partnership with Jessica Helfand at Winterhouse, a design consultancy focused on social change and innovation, publishing and online media, and cultural and educational institutions. Recent clients include Poetry Foundation, Nextbook, New England Journal of Medicine, Archives of American Art, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Harvard Law Review, Yale School of Management, New York University School of Journalism, University of Chicago Press and the National Design Awards. He is currently the design director of Teach For All, an international initiative of Teach For America working on education innovation in 10 countries. Through Winterhouse Institute, he is the recipient of a $1.5 million Rockefeller Foundation grant for 2009-2010 to develop collective action and collaboration for social impact across the design industry.

Bill is the co-founder of Design Observer, the widely-read blog about design and visual culture, and the founder of the Polling Place Photo Project, an online election documentation project supported by The New York Times during the last election cycle. As a publisher, he develops books under the Winterhouse imprint with the University of Chicago Press and Yale University Press.

Bill is president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a former trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Poetry Society, a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU, and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management. He lectures widely on design and communications in the U.S. and abroad, and will be a resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2010. He is a graduate of Princeton University, and lives in Falls Village, Connecticut, USA.

William Drenttel is a designer and publisher, and editorial director of Design Observer. He is a partner at Winterhouse, a design consultancy focused on social change, online media and educational institutions, and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.

Recent Video

National Design Award Trophy

In October 2011, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum unveiled a new trophy for the National Design Awards. Originally designed as an asterisk in silicon carbide by Winterhouse in 2000, the new glass trophy is by Corning GlassLab.