Julian Bittiner appointed Assistant Director of Graphic Design Studies

JULY 15, 2020

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce Senior Critic Julian Bittiner has been appointed Assistant Director of Graphic Design Studies. He will work alongside the program’s Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. De Bretteville shared, “Julian, as Assistant Director of Graphic Design Studies, brings a new kind of balance and partnering. He adds an engaged and thoughtful leadership style, and together we will begin to enhance and shape our area of study in relationship to the other areas of study here at the Yale School of Art.”

After serving as Acting Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design for the Spring 2020 semester, Senior Critic Bittiner will formally join the department’s leadership after serving as a faculty member at the School since 2008. In his new role, Bittiner plans to lead the development of the program’s undergraduate and preliminary year programs, while de Bretteville will continue guiding the development and growth of the final two years of the School of Art’s MFA program in Graphic Design.

As part of the Graphic Design program’s senior leadership, Bittiner joins de Bretteville who recently began her third decade at the helm of the department after becoming the first tenured woman in the School’s history in 1990. With a combined teaching experience of nearly a half-century, both Bittiner and de Bretteville have mentored hundreds of students who each in their own way are continuing to shape, change and develop the trajectory of graphic design’s ever-expanding reach.

Julian Bittiner was first appointed as a Critic in Graphic Design in 2008, before being appointed Senior Critic in 2019. Originally from Geneva, Switzerland, Bittiner is an independent designer based in New York. His typographically-invested studio practice, informed by the architectural notion of ‘critical regionalism,’ centers around an investigation of formal contrasts and contradictions, between typologies and the ‘singularity of things,’ professionalism and amateurism, abstract systems and the ad hoc. He received a BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design in 1995 and is an alumnus of the program he now helps lead, receiving an MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art in 2008. Collaborating closely with artists, curators, and institutions on a variety of projects, commissions have come from Jonathan Berger, Sam Contis, Anoka Faruqee, Logan Grider, Mary Reid Kelley, Michael Stipe, Adams and Ollman gallery, ART PAPERS, the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University, New York University’s 80WSE Gallery, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. His work and writing have appeared in GRAPHIC magazine, I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there: The Expanding Field of Graphic Design, Introducing Culture Identities: Design for Museums, Theaters and Cultural Institutions, Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode, Poster Tribune, Slanted magazine, Soanyway magazine, Taking a Line for a Walk: Assignments in Design, and the journal Visual Communication. He has been a visiting tutor at the Typography Summer School in New York, and for the past twelve years has served as a faculty member at the Yale School of Art, now as both Senior Critic and Assistant Director of Graphic Design Studies.