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.”
Doug Powell
Wallace Herndon Smith Visiting Lecturer 2025-26
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.