Ellen Lupton is an author, designer, publisher, and reader of books. With J. Abbott Miller, she is co-chair of visual communications at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is adjunct curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, where she has organized a series of major exhibitions, including: Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), The Avant-Garde Letterhead (1996), and Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture (1996). In 1996 she published the book Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design with J. Abbott Miller.