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Mariana Amatullo

Vice President, Designmatters Department

mariana.amatullo@artcenter.edu

Mariana Amatullo founded the college-wide initiative Designmatters at Art Center College of Design, based in Pasadena, California in 2001 with a task force of faculty, chairs, staff and students. In her capacity as the lead of the Department, she develops strategic educational partnerships and oversees a portfolio of research collaborations, communication campaigns, exhibitions and publications that enhance Art Center’s commitment to be at the forefront of international design education and contribute solutions to humanitarian issues of critical urgency.

At the curricular level, Amatullo is at the helm of the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact, a formal course of study that affords Art Center students from all undergraduate disciplines the opportunity to graduate from the college with an emphasis in art and design for social impact and innovation; she is also collaborating in the development of the Media Design Matters (MDM) track within the Graduate Media Design Program MFA.  This is an innovative and immersive graduate track that brings design and new communication technologies into areas such as international development, public policy and economic innovation, where students and faculty delve deep into systemic issues with a consortium of partner organizations. Through Amatullo’s leadership, Art Center is the first design institution to be formally affiliated with the Department of Public Information at the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO); and a civil society organization member with the Organization of American States (OAS/OEA). The award-winning and tangible outcomes of the student projects that are developed under the mantle of Designmatters have established the program as an exemplary effort within the landscape of social impact design–uniting educational objectives with highly effective advocacy and action-oriented outcomes.

An active essayist and lecturer, Amatullo also serves on a variety of advisory boards and networks engaged in the arts, design education and social activism, including IDEO.org, the Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journal Tassmeem: Design-Research-Connect, Design 21 (in partnership with UNESCO), Intelligent Mobility International (IMI) and the University of Southern California International Museum Institute.

Amatullo is currently a Non-Profit Research Fellow with the Doctorate of Management Program, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.  She holds an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Southern California (1994) and a Licence en Lettres Degree from the Sorbonne University, Paris (1990).  Her undergraduate studies included two years at l’Ecole du Louvre, Paris.  Amatullo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and brought up internationally through the Argentine diplomatic corps.

Elisa Ruffino

Director, Designmatters Department

elisa.ruffino@artcenter.edu

Elisa Ruffino is the Director of the Designmatters program at Art Center College of Design, where she is responsible for leading the program’s operations, and overseeing management of the Designmatters’ portfolio of ongoing projects.  Elisa is the active liaison between Art Center creative teams and Designmatters’ collaborators in the nonprofit, government, global development, academic and business sectors, to yield the program’s trademark real-world outcomes.

Since joining Designmatters in 2002, Elisa has worked closely with Art Center students, faculty and alumni to produce several award-winning awareness campaigns, publications, and documentary films. In 2010, in response to the release of USGS scientific data foretelling a plausible catastrophic winter storm that would devastate economic and emergency management systems across California, she convened a top team of faculty, students and alumni on the multi-faceted USGS ARkStorm project. Under Elisa’s leadership, the initiative produced two short films, an identity system, and a key role for Art Center in the USGS-hosted ARkStorm Summit in Sacramento in January 2011. There, the team conceived the Summit’s programmatic activities and immersive working sessions, which resulted in catalyzed discussion and consensus among more than 200 participants including emergency managers, structural engineers, meteorologists, business leaders, and policy makers at the local, state and federal levels.

Before joining Art Center, Elisa was a longtime member of the artist development team at Warner Bros. Records, and a professional landscape designer. Following her studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she earned the title of Master Gardener from the University of California, Los Angeles.

An avid music and plant lover, Elisa spends her favorite Sundays gardening to vintage vinyl records played at high volume.