Warren Lehrer

Warren Lehrer (he/him) is a designer/book artist and writer known internationally as a pioneer of visual literature and design authorship. His work is acclaimed for its marriage of writing and typography, capturing the shape of thought and speech and reuniting oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations and performance.

Honors include the 2019 Ladislav Sutnar Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Design, 2016 Honoree of The Center for Book Arts, two NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowships (2020, 1989), an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Fellowship, the Brendan Gill Prize. Other awards include: three AIGA Book Awards, two Type Directors Club awards, two Design Incubation Awards, a Special Recognition Award from the Society of Typographic Arts, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, the International Book Award for Best New Fiction, a Media That Matters Award, and grants from New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, The Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, and Tate Gallery.

Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. He is a frequent lecturer, keynote speaker, performer and presenter at universities, conferences, art and literary centers, and bookstores throughout the U.S. and internationally. He is available for select commissions working with poets, writers, publishers visualizing original texts into works of visual literature/artists’ books/animations.

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