Doug Powell: Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Faculty Visiting Lecture
Doug Powell will deliver the Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Faculty Visiting Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Doug Powell
Doug Powell is an award-winning designer and executive design leader with more than 30 years of experience in a wide range of design disciplines. An alum of the WashU College of Art, Powell received the school’s Distinguished Alumni Award and the AIGA Minnesota Fellow Award, both in 2014. Powell is a lecturer, commentator, and thought leader on design issues. He has presented at a variety of global conferences, forums, and universities, including Beirut Design Week in Lebanon, Fortune’s Brainstorm Design in Singapore, and the Yale School of Management. He was on the jury of the 2018 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. From 2011-2013, Powell served as the national president of AIGA, the professional association for design in the U.S.
In the past decade, Powell served as vice president of design at IBM and Expedia Group, where he oversaw design practices, design systems, and designer career and leadership programs, as well as the scaling of cross-functional design thinking practices across the companies. Alongside his leadership training and coaching practice, he is the producer and host of “This Is A Prototype: The Design Leadership Podcast.”
Wallace Herndon Smith Visiting Lecturer 2025-26
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series