Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Audrey Bennett. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Audrey thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

I am a naturalized African-American of Afro-Caribbean descent. I hail from Nassau, Bahamas, where I lived for the first three years of my life before moving to my parents’ birthplace of Jamaica. After three years there, my family migrated to the United States. I grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, with a mother who cooked Caribbean food daily, played reggae music every Saturday morning, and alternated between speaking Jamaican patois and standard English. Though neither of my parents had college degrees, they believed in education. They instilled in me hope in education’s value to my future. As a child entering middle school, my mother, after sitting me down, only had to tell me once that she did not want to see anything lower than a B on my report card, so I brought home only A’s throughout secondary school. As a result, at the inner-city high school I attended, my peers often labeled me a nerd. After graduating valedictorian from high school, I traveled further north to pursue an undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College (a place my Caucasian social studies teacher warned me was “chalk white,” but I went anyway). Subsequently, I earned a terminal graduate degree from Yale University’s School of Art.

Because we lived in the inner city, my mom rarely, if at all (I have no memories), allowed me to play at my friends’ homes, so I played at home most of the time with my siblings or by myself. What I loved to play most by myself was school. I alternated between role-playing my math teacher (i.e., my fifth-grade math teacher, Mrs. Tutt), a good student (i.e., me), and a student struggling with math (i.e., a peer). I also loved to draw during playtime as well. Having heard about my drawing ability once, when my father visited us from Brooklyn, NY, for my 13th birthday, he gifted me art materials and a royal blue art bin. The latter, I still use today, nearly four decades later.

These interactions with my parents and the home they created molded me into the award-winning art and design scholar I am today. But that doesn’t mean it’s a formula for success. Today’s parents might fear “mom shaming” for not having as many play dates or having a child who pursues play alone. I hope those parents can help their children find their own path, however odd it might seem. And that’s the part of my story my parents did exactly right.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am the 2022 AIGA Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary winner; a 2019 inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan; a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a 1997 College Art Association Professional Development Fellow. In 2018, I joined the faculty at the University of Michigan as a Professor of Art and Design (with tenure) in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and Professor of Communication and Media in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Before that, I was a full professor (with tenure) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in its Department of Communication and Media. There, I was appointed Assistant Professor on the tenure track in 1997.

I study transdisciplinary, interactive images that, through multisensory and multimodal user engagement, aim to yield transformative meaning. Transformative meaning occurs when the viewer interprets the image’s intended message and reaches a profound understanding, evidenced by cognitive and behavioral changes. Through my ongoing fieldwork on the collaborative and participatory design of interactive images for cross-cultural, social interaction; my life and fruitful research partnership with the father of African Fractals, Ron Eglash, in ethnomathematics and ethnocomputing; and my international projects in China, Taiwan, Ghana, and South Africa, I maintain an active, prolific, and lucrative research agenda that has resulted in many accomplishments of which I am most proud of my cultural commentary on the African Roots of Swiss Design that has garnered thus far over 90K reads through publications in The Conversation, Fast Company, among other media venues around the world.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My 26-year professional trajectory on the tenure track and now tenured within academia was a pivot in the early phase of my career. After graduate school, I chose between entering the design industry or academia.

The former context is what I had been trained to enter with my conceptual visual communication design skills. The summer after I graduated from graduate school, I had the opportunity, as a design temp in NYC, to gain some professional experience by applying my newfound knowledge to visually translate information into communicative and aesthetic corporate identity materials that aimed to sell brands, products, and ideas.

The latter context, however, is what I chose. That summer, I accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where the “publish or perish” mantra immediately took control of my professional ambitions and redirected me towards theoretical research and writing. After attaining tenure with a dossier that straddled creative practice (with mainly peer-reviewed exhibitions), I pivoted entirely towards academic research and writing.

This transition was outside of my comfort zone that, mid-stream, in my pursuit of promotion to full professor, I decided to return to industry where I felt I could make a real difference in the world and my heritage community through graphic design practice. However, before effectuating this decision, I sought counsel from a mentor. His response was precise and profound: Even something as familiar as milk is theoretically grounded—Pasteure didn’t just “prove” a truth; he had to convert French farms into a laboratory. The same goes for issues like racism: a theory about “inferior brains” is never proved; it is just used to justify segregation, whose outcome of lower achievement then becomes racism’s self-fulfilling prophecy. The light bulb clicked on over my head. Thus, I remained in academia as a full-time scholar conducting research for social justice.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

While joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, I delivered an invited presentation titled “Defining and executing a graphic design research agenda (if only for the sake of justice)” at Decipher: The 2018 Design Educator’s Research Conference at U-M’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. There, I implored my fellow graphic designers to take heed of the following:

“Today, in society… one finds rampant social injustices due in large part to the legacy of racist theory, like the role of genetic determinism in learning…that undermines the intellectual capabilities of people of color like me. Communities suffering injustices like this can benefit from the attention and, more importantly, graphic designers’ research. Indeed, the future sustenance of society (humanity and the environment) depends on graphic designers being mindful of their role as co-stewards (with experts from other disciplines and the community) of social change by engaging in research.”

My mission then and now is to use research-generated theory to counter the legacy of racist theory with heritage algorithms that can lead generations of oppressed communities to equity and justice.

Contact Info:

• Website: audreygbennett.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/audrey-bennett-a726931/

Image Credits
Audrey Grace Bennett as a child held by her late mother, Sylvia M. Bennett who is standing next to her late father Aston George Bennett in Nassau, Bahamas. The Bennett sisters in order of age: Audrey, Denise, and Joan. Photo of Professor Audrey G. Bennett in the courtyard of the Art and Architecture Building at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan. Photo by Danielle Kiminyo, undergraduate art and design major and photographer Photo of Professor Audrey G. Bennett in the courtyard of the Art and Architecture Building at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan. Photo by Danielle Kiminyo, undergraduate art and design major and photographer