Mark Breitenberg

Dr. Mark Breitenberg is the Provost at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. In 2009, he became the President of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), the largest design body in the world, representing organizations comprising over 200,000 design professionals, educators and promoters. Breitenberg served as Chair of the jury for the 2010 National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and he was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission by Mayor Gavin Newsom in July, 2010.

He holds a Ph.D in Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California and a Bachelor’s degree in Government from the College of William and Mary.

As Dean at Art Center College of Design (2003-2009), he created a new curriculum uniquely designed to lead and support the studio programs based on the transdisciplinary complement of liberal arts and sciences to studio practice. He also established a college-wide design research program, a new science curriculum with professors from CalTech and the Jet Propulsion Lab, and a new business curriculum, including Art Center’s collaborative exchange with the INSEAD MBA programs in Fountainbleau, France, and Singapore.

As a professor of literature at Swarthmore College, he wrote Anxious Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which analyzes masculine identity in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, now a seminal text in the emerging field of masculinity studies. His literary writings also include many articles on literary history, critical theory, gender and sexuality and Reformation poetics.

Dr. Breitenberg’s writing and speaking on design and design education address issues such as: design-based learning, the interdisciplinary studio, design thinking, human-centered research, narrative and the creative process. He is a frequent speaker at design conferences and events around the world.