Giorgia Lupi is an information designer.

She is a Partner at Pentagram in New York.

After receiving her master’s degree in Architecture, she earned her PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano.

In 2011, she co-founded Accurat, an internationally acclaimed data-driven design firm with offices in Milan and New York.

She is co-author of Dear Data and of the new interactive book Observe, Collect, Draw - A Visual Journal.

Giorgia is also a public speaker, her TED TALK on her humanistic approach to data has over one million views.

She has been named One of "Fast Company's" 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018, when she also joined MIT Media Lab as a Director’s Fellow. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on New Metrics and recently became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Art and a National Geographic explorer. She was nominated as “one of the names to know in Creative America” by Wallpaper. She is part of the advisory council for the Data Visualization Society.

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where in 2017 she also was commissioned to create an original site-specific piece.

In 2022, she received a honorary degree in Fine Arts from MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Giorgia is the 2022 National Design Award for Communication Design winner presented by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Giorgia Lupi’s work synthesizes data and storytelling in innovative ways to create unique and singular brand expressions.

In her practice, she designs engaging data-driven visual narratives across print, digital and environmental media that create new insight and appreciation of people, ideas, and organizations.

Her vibrant and inspiring design work empowers leading global organizations to achieve their mission through data-driven storytelling, and reflects her belief that data has the capacity to make us all more human - advancing our intelligence, engagement, and delight.”

-

Thanks to her work and research, Giorgia is a prominent voice in the world of data.

She has been featured in major international outlets such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Washington Post, T magazine, NPR, CBC, BBC, Time magazine, Business Insider, Forbes, National Geographic, Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, Flash Art, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Monocle, Print magazine, Creative Review, Fast Company, El Pais, and Corriere della Sera.

She has spoken at numerous events and institutions around the world, including TED, the Museum of Modern Art, THE MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art), the Guggenheim Museum, OFFF festival PopTech Conference, Eyeo Festival, Fast Company Innovation by Design, Visualized, the International Journalism Festival, Wired Next Fest, Strata Conference, and the New York Public Library. She has lectured at New York University, Columbia University, Yale University, the New School, the School of Visual Arts, University of Central London, Helsinki’s Alvar Aalto University, and Politecnico di Milano, among others.

She has worked with major international clients including IBM, Google, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Starbucks, United Nations, World Health Organization, Triennale Milano Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, World Economic Forum, Knight Foundation, LVMH Group, Unicredit Group, TED, Target, Columbia University, Corriere della Sera, Gucci, JPMorgan Chase, Scientific American, Popular Science, University of California Berkley, Valentino, Wired.

She has won numerous awards, including multiple gold medals at the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards in 2013, 2014, and 2015, a Bronze Lion at the Cannes Festival of Creativity in 2013, and the "Lezioni di Design" Prize at Milan’s Design Week in 2016. She was nominated for the Design Museum Beazley Design of the Year in 2016 and has served as a jury member for many prestigious design awards.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned a site-specific original art piece in 2017 and her work has also been exhibited at the Design Museum, the Science Museum, and Somerset House in London, the Cooper Hewitt, Palais the Tokyo and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, New York Botanical Garden, the New York Hall of Science and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Museum of Design in Atlanta, at the Triennale Design Museum and the Design Week in Milan, and at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel, among others.

Giorgia is the co-author of Dear Data, an aspirational hand-drawn data visualization book that explores the more slippery details of daily life through data, revealing the patterns that inform our decisions and affect our relationships. Her newest book Observe, Collect, Draw which draws from the popular success of Dear Data and is a guided journal with a fresh approach to the trend of journal-as-tool-for-self-examination..

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

_

What sets Giorgia apart is her humanistic approach to the world of data. Data is considered to be impersonal, boring, and clinical, but her work proves the opposite.

She uses data as a lens to better understand our human nature and every aspect of our society. By distilling our personal experiences (our activities, thoughts, behaviors, relationships) into what we so coldly call data, and by actively building her datasets and expressing them as a designer and artist, she seeks to grasp glimpses of humanity and discover overlooked details.

When Giorgia is presented with data, she seeks to humanize it, to make it speak our language and represent our human nature, because, in her opinion, this is the ultimate goal of any design work, especially with data. She often combines the original data with layers of softer and more qualitative information that renders and presents its more nuanced and more human aspects of us.  

What interests her is the data we don’t see, the data that is not already in form of data but that can often help us see more, and help us see better.

Giorgia also sees beauty in data. In her visual practice, she challenges the impersonality that data communicate, designing engaging visual narratives that re-connect numbers to what they stand for: stories, people, ideas.

She makes sense of data with a curious mind and a heterogeneous arsenal, which ranges from digital technology to exhausting and repetitive manual labor. She believes we will ultimately unlock the full potential of data only when we embrace their nature, and make them part of our lives, which will inevitably make data more human in the process. 

Trained as an architect, Giorgia has always been driven by opposing forces: analysis and intuition, logic and beauty, numbers and images. True to these dichotomies, in 2011 she started both her own company and studying for a PhD.
She earned her Doctorate in Design at Politecnico di Milano, where she focused on information mapping, and is the Design Director and co-founder of Accurat, a global, data-driven research, design, and innovation firm with offices in Milan and New York.
She relocated from Italy to New York City, where she now lives.

-

What others say:

“Giorgia Lupi is the personification of grace under pressure. Of exquisite design grace under overflowing data pressure! Data visualization is a normal part of our information diet, but only a few designers are able to achieve utmost clarity and at the same time memorable elegance. Moving seamlessly between digital and analog space, Giorgia transforms even the driest quantitative analysis into a touching moment of humanity and poetry.”

----- Paola Antonelli

“Giorgia’s work deftly combines the natural fluidity of her hands in ways that overpower the often rigid, heartless smell of data.”

“Giorgia is an illustrator who thinks like a computer, who works with machine-like precision but with the heart of a human being. She’s living in the modern world, using what her hands do best and making this wonderful synthesis, a precise blend."

------ John Maeda

“Giorgia Lupi bridges imaginative wildness and deliberate creative constraint to illuminate the most human and humane dimensions of what we so coldly term "data" – the sum total of our habits, experiences, and unquantifiable fragments of being that make us who we are.”

------- Maria Popova