Vitae (condensed)

Heather Shaw is an Associate Professor of Design at Lesley University College of Art and Design. She has lectured nationally and internationally on the integration of dynamic media with traditional graphic design pedagogy. Heather earned her MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and BFA in Visual Design from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her professional experience spans print, motion and interactive media; and clients include MIT, Brandeis University, Perkins School for the Blind, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has also served as the Vice President and Education Director for AIGA Boston, The Professional Association for Design.

In 2014, she presented at the National AIGA Conference New Ventures in Portland OR. Her presentation: “Mapping Campus Accessibility”  was one of three presentations in the panel session Intersections in and through collaborative practices. Her abstract was selected through a double blind review process, and only 1/3 of the proposals submitted to the conference were accepted for presentation.

In 2013, she was an invited speaker for the first Motion Design Education Summit (MODE), at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. Her talk was titled: “Teaching Motion Literacy in Undergraduate Curriculum.” That same year, she co-lectured on the topic  “Preserving Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums” at the 2013 conference Resurrecting the Book, at the Library of Birmingham in Birmingham, UK.

In 2012, her lecture “Exploring Master Works through Web Development and Computational Design” was presented at the Athens Institute for Education and Research 3rd Annual Conference on Visual and Performing Arts in Athens, Greece. That same year she spoke on “Creating a Rigorous BA in Graphic Design: Unique Methods and Processes for Assessing a Major” at the Assessment in the Arts conference in Denver CO.

In 2010, she taught a five-day workshop sponsored by the Higher Education Press (HEP) in Beijing for Chinese design educators. The workshop pulled content from her curriculum published in the book: Methodology, Teaching of Visual Arts and Design in the U.S.A. by Yanyan Sun at Tsinghua University. Additionally, her typography curriculum for motion and web-based technologies is featured in the third edition of Type Rules! by Ilene Strizver.

In 2008-09, her lecture: “enCODE / deCODE: What Die Neue Typographie (from 1928) can teach us about web design standards today” was presented at the Imagine IT: Design for All conference at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy; and additionally at TypeCon: Rhythm in Atlanta, GA. She was interviewed by Donald Beekman and Liza Enebeis for the podcast: “TypeRadio” at the Imagine IT conference in 2008.

In 2007, she co-chaired the National AIGA Boston Design Education Conference: Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media and additional chaired two sessions. Her curriculum: “Understanding Visual Narratives” is published in Teaching Motion Design: Course Offerings and Class Projects from the Leading Undergraduate and Graduate Programs edited by Steven Heller and Michael Dooley.