Natalia Ilyin

Professor of Design, Design History and Criticism at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Natalia also teaches classes in design for social activism, transition design, and semiotics of brand. She and her former co-teacher Elisabeth Patterson created the Parallel Narratives publishing program at Cornish. This program is dedicated to reimagining design history, growing data from the student up rather than from the historian down. She has received Cornish's Award for Teaching Excellence twice. She is also Founding Faculty of the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts. There, she advises students on writing, design history, and criticism.

Natalia has also taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, The Cooper Union, and the University of Washington, and has acted as Critic for the MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design.

A former National Director of Programs for the American Institute of Graphic Arts in New York, she has given talks and workshops at Microsoft, Boeing, RISD, Maine College of Art, California College of Art, Art Center College of Design's Toyota lecture series, the Wolfsonian Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, and other nice places.

Her articles have been published in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Portland Oregonian, the Miami Herald, Metropolis, Adbusters, Eye, Print, Communication Arts, 2+3D, Grey Magazine, and in several anthologies of design criticism, including the recent Total Armageddon, edited by Ian Lynam.

Her first memoir, Blonde Like Me, was published by Simon and Schuster. Just starting out as a writer, Natalia was so worried about future criticism that she became a frozen ball of anxiety while finishing the last chapter. Her agent finally walked down to her apartment and pulled the manuscript from her cramped hand. 

When she moved to a cottage near Seattle, Natalia looked back at her time in New York, and wrote Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time. Published by Metropolis Books, it's a personal look at the legacy of Modernism and its effects.

Her third book, Writing for the Design Mind, is a textbook written specifically for designers who want to write. It emphasizes many kinds of visual methods for creating and structuring writing. Recently published by Bloomsbury Academic, it benefits from her years of experience as a writer and teacher.