Cheryl Heller
Cheryl Heller, PhD, is a designer, artist, business strategist and educator. Through her design agency, CommonWise, she helps leaders around the world develop their creative capacity, navigate the future and realize their purpose in it. Her clients include Ford Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Lumina Foundation the Girl Scouts of America, Verizon, American Express, Marriott Corporation, Mars Corporation, Bayer Corporation and the Ford Motor Company. She is President of the Measured Lab, which she founded to investigate the contribution design makes to human health.
She pioneered the field of social design, founding its first STEM Master’s program at the School of Visual Arts. She was Director of Design Integration and Professor of Practice in Innovation Design at Arizona State University, where she built the first transdisciplinary STEM Master’s program in Innovation and Venture Development. She teaches at Babson College, #1 for entrepreneurship and the CENTRO school in Mexico.
Dr. Heller received the AIGA Lifetime Medal for her contribution to the field of design and is a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow. She wrote The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Universal Creative Potential of Social Design, a manual for creating a more resilient future.
She created the Ideas that Matter program for Sappi, which has given over $15 million to designers working for the public good, and partnered with Paul Polak and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum to create the exhibit, “Design for the Other 90%.”
She paints eight-foot-tall portraits of songbirds, and is is working on another book called “Learning to See.”
