November 18, 2021
Design Leaders Who Pioneer Innovation and Influence Society Honored by ArtCenter College of Design
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yves Béhar, Bruce Heavin and Mariana Prieto Receive Alumni Awards for Creating Meaningful Change through Art and Design
ArtCenter College of Design is pleased to announce the 15th Annual Alumni Award recipients to be honored at an event set to take place in 2022. The Alumni Awards are an opportunity for ArtCenter to recognize and celebrate the service and influence of individuals who represent the impact of an ArtCenter education on the world to shape a more humane future.
The 2021 Alumni Awards will honor Hiroshi Sugimoto (BFA 74 Photography) with the Lifetime Achievement Award, Yves Béhar (BS 91 Product Design) with the Distinguished Midcareer Award, Bruce Heavin (BFA 93 Illustration) with the Outstanding Service Award, and Mariana Prieto (BS 12 Product Design) with the Young Innovator Award.
“Hiroshi, Yves, Bruce and Mariana exemplify dedicated alumni who throughout their lives continue to give back to the College on many levels,” said Lorne M. Buchman, president, ArtCenter College of Design. “They are significant figures in shaping culture, and they inspire future generations of ArtCenter students to influence change.”
Together, these four individuals offer insight into the cross-disciplinary nature of ArtCenter’s approach to learning.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (BFA 74 Photography) Lifetime Achievement Award
Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to the United States in 1970 to study photography. A multi-disciplinary artist, Sugimoto works in photography, sculpture, installation, and architecture. His art bridges Eastern and Western ideologies while examining the nature of time, perception, and the origins of consciousness. His photographic series include Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Architecture, Portraits, Conceptual Forms, and Lightning Fields, among others. In 2009, he established the Odawara Art Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization to promote traditional Japanese performing arts and culture. Sugimoto’s art works have been exhibited around the world and are in numerous public collections including The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London; and the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
Yves Béhar (BS 91 Product Design) Distinguished Midcareer Award
Yves Béhar, founder and CEO of fuseproject, is a designer and entrepreneur who believes that integrated product, brand and experience design are the cornerstones of any business. Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental change. His humanitarian work includes the One Laptop Per Child and See Better to Learn Better, which has distributed 6 million free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico for the last 10 years. He received the INDEX Award for these projects, making him the only designer to have received the award twice. Béhar has also been at the forefront of entrepreneurial venture design, co-founding FORME Life, August, and Canopy, as well as partnering with numerous start-ups such as the Happiest Baby Snoo, Uber, Cobalt, Desktop Metal, Sweetgreen and many others. Other notable collaborations with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, Movado, Samsung, Puma, Issey Miyake, Prada, SodaStream, Nivea, The Ocean Cleanup and many others have also received international acclaim.
Bruce Heavin (BFA 93 Illustration) Outstanding Service Award
Bruce Heavin is an artist, strategist and entrepreneur. As the chief creative officer and co-founder of lynda.com, his vision was integral to the company's success as a pioneering leader in online training. He created the company's iconic logo of his wife Lynda Weinman, designed many of the distinctive illustrations on the website and course DVD covers, and authored some of the site's first video tutorials in Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and ImageReady. An illustrator with extensive background in photography and motion graphics, he has created works for national publications as well as clients including Adobe, MSNBC and E! Entertainment Television. As a distinguished and committed alumnus, he has been an active and generous donor as well as a proponent of philanthropy in the ArtCenter community. He has served as a founding board member of FullCircle, the College’s giving society, and was elected to the ArtCenter Board of Trustees in June 2014.
Mariana Prieto (BS 12 Product Design) Young Innovator Award
Mariana Prieto is the founder of Design for Wildlife, a collective that works with wildlife conservation organizations to achieve large scale, economically sustainable solutions for wildlife related challenges. Their work focuses on creating solutions that can be economically sustainable, and therefore donor independent, and able to achieve long term global impact. Prieto is an adjunct professor at ArtCenter and was named TED Resident in 2018 and 2019 for her work in wildlife conservation and won the Emerging Scholar Award by Common Ground in 2020. Previous to her career in wildlife conservation, she worked as Innovation Lead for the International Rescue Committee, was Global Design Fellow for IDEO.org where she worked on numerous projects across East Africa and Asia.
The ArtCenter Alumni Awards are an annual recognition bestowed by the college and the Office of Alumni Relations, with input from the internal ArtCenter community and global AlumNetwork 23,000 strong and growing. Honoring outstanding graduates is an opportunity for ArtCenter to publicly recognize the extraordinary talent, impressive service and influential reach of its alumni.
Past Alumni Award recipients include Lee Friedlander (Photography), Melodie McDaniel (BFA 91), Doug Aitken (BFA 91), Syd Mead (BS 59), Shiro Nakamura (Transportation Design), Drew Struzan (BFA 70), Kenji Ekuan (BS 57), Sterling Ruby (MFA 15), Wendy MacNaughton (BFA 99), Mikio Osaki (BFA 61), Stephanie Sigg (MS 98), Michael Osborne (BFA 78), Ini Archibong (BS 12), Katie Dill (BS 07), Jessie Kawata (BFA 11), Spencer Nikosey (BS 2008) and Kevin Bethune (MS 12).
To see a complete list of Alumni Award honorees, visit http://www.artcenter.edu/about/alumni/alumni-awards.html
Social Media:
@artcenteredu
@artcenter_alumnetwork
About ArtCenter: Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. ArtCenter offers 11 undergraduate and 10 graduate degrees in a wide variety of industrial design disciplines as well as visual and applied arts. In addition to its top-ranked academic programs, the College also serves members of the Greater Los Angeles region through a highly regarded series of year-round extension programs for all ages and levels of experience. Renowned for both its ties to industry and its social impact initiatives, ArtCenter is the first design school to receive the United Nations’ Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status in recognition of its commitment to social impact design through Designmatters. Throughout the College’s long and storied history, ArtCenter alumni have had a profound impact on popular culture, the way we live and important issues in our society.
Contact:
Teri Bond
Media Relations Director
ArtCenter College of Design
teri.bond@artcenter.edu
626 396.2385 office
