Jessica Helfand is an artist, designer, and writer. She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received both her BA and MFA from Yale University, where she taught for more than two decades. A founding editor of Design Observer, she is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, including Scrapbooks: An American History (2008), Design: The Invention of Desire (2016), and Face: A Visual Odyssey (2019). Her most recent book, Self-Reliance—a typographic reflection on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic text accompanied by a series of essays on studio practice—was published earlier this year by Thames&Hudson. The first-ever recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome, Jessica Helfand has been a Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, and an Artist in Residence at Caltech.