ArtCenter College of Design

A practitioner-scholar, educator, and author, Dr. Mariana Amatullo has overseen the award-winning portfolio of Designmatters collaborations in art and design education and social innovation at ArtCenter in Pasadena since establishing the groundbreaking program in 2001. Recipient of the inaugural Dell Social Innovation Education Award, Amatullo was named in Fast Company’s 50 Designers Shaping the Future and the Public Interest Design 100. Through her leadership, ArtCenter is the first design institution to be affiliated as a non-governmental organization (NGO) with the United Nations. Amatullo serves on a variety of advisory and executive boards of organizations engaged in the arts, design education and social innovation and lectures internationally about design and social innovation.Amatullo holds an M.A. in art history and museum studies from University of Southern California and a Licence en Lettres Degree from the Paris-Sorbonne University. She attained a Ph.D. in management from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, where she’s a scholar-in-residence and a design and innovation fellow. Her dissertation, Design Attitude and Social Innovation: Empirical Studies of the Return on Design, is one of the first studies in the design research literature that presents quantitative metrics demonstrating the statistical significance of design capabilities in the context of social innovation practices.