Warren Lehrer

Warren Lehrer is a writer and designer known internationally as a “pioneer of visual literature and design authorship.” His interdisciplinary practice fuses writing and typography and attempts to capture the shape of thought and speech, and reunite oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations, installations and performance. His solo and collaborative books and multi-media projects explore the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual, and the pathos and absurdity of life. He is the author of 12 books including Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America (W.W. Norton, with Judith Sloan), A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (Goff), and Five Oceans in a Teaspoon (Paper Crown Press, with Dennis Bernstein). He is also available for select commissions working with poets, writers, publishers visualizing original texts into works of visual literature/artists’ books/animations.

Honors include the 2019 Ladislav Sutnar Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Design, 2016 Honoree of The Center for Book Arts, two NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowships (2020, 1989), a 2022 NYSCA (New York State Council on the Arts) Individual Artist Grant in Literature, an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Fellowship, the Brendan Gill Prize. Other awards include: the International Book Award for Best New Fiction, the IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award, three AIGA Book Awards, two Type Directors Club awards, two Design Incubation Awards, a Special Recognition Award from the Society of Typographic Arts, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, a Media That Matters Award, and grants from the Rockefeller, Ford, Greenwall and Furthermore Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, Walker Arts Center, Georges Pompidou Centre, and Tate Gallery.

Lehrer is a frequent lecturer, keynote speaker, performer and presenter at universities, conferences, art and literary centers, and bookstores throughout the U.S. and internationally. He is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, New York and Stonington Maine.