Giorgia Lupi has built a career at the intersection of design, storytelling, and information, treating data not as cold fact but as something deeply human.
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This episode is hosted by Monica Holt.
Arts and cultural organizations are constantly being asked to demonstrate their impact. Data can help us make that case, but how do we bring the stories behind the numbers to life?
For Giorgia Lupi, award-winning information designer and partner at Pentagram, data is far more than a collection of facts and figures. Approaching numbers with an artist’s mindset can help us communicate not just what we do, but why it matters.
As Giorgia gets ready to take the stage at Capacity Boot Camp 2026, we’re bringing you a special encore of her Arts Unscripted episode where we dig into her philosophy of “data humanism” and how a more nuanced approach to numbers can change the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. This refreshed conversation also features a few previously unreleased moments from the original interview.
Want to hear more from Giorgia? Catch her keynote with a virtual ticket to Boot Camp.
Giorgia Lupi: Always remember what data stands for, which are our messy, imperfect, uncertain human lives. And even if we want to display them through metrics, all of these elements that are imperfection, uncertainty, uniqueness in a story needs to be taken into account and rendered.
Monica Holt: Welcome back to Arts Unscripted: A Capacity Podcast. I’m your host, Monica Holt. Today, we’re revisiting a conversation with Giorgia Lupi, an award-winning information designer and Partner at Pentagram. Her work challenges us to think about data in a completely different way. And there’s a special reason why we’re bringing this conversation back today. Giorgia is taking the stage as a keynote speaker at Capacity Boot Camp, our annual conference for arts and culture professionals. It’s happening right now in Brooklyn. Arts organizations are constantly being asked to demonstrate their impact, but how do we tell the stories behind the numbers? How do we communicate not just what we do, but why it matters? These are questions at the heart of Giorgia’s work. She’s built her career at the intersection of art, design, and information, exploring how data can be a deeply human medium for telling stories, expressing ideas, and understanding the world around us.
In our conversation, Giorgia shared her philosophy of “data humanism,” inviting us to look beyond the metrics and recognize the people, the emotions, and the experiences behind them. And she makes a compelling case for how creativity can transform information into something that inspires connection and action. We first released this conversation earlier in 2026, but for today’s encore, we’ve revisited that original recording and added a few moments that you haven’t heard before. Whether you’re joining us at Boot Camp in Brooklyn this week or listening from wherever you are around the globe, I hope Giorgia’s perspective inspires you to look at data with fresh eyes. Let’s dive in.
Giorgia Lupi, welcome to Arts Unscripted. Thank you so much for being here today. I am so excited to chat with you.
Giorgia Lupi: Thanks so much, Monica. I’m really thrilled to be here.
Monica Holt: We like to start each episode by asking, what was your first relationship to art growing up? Were you involved in visual or performing arts and how did it touch your life?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah, so I was a dancer. I studied ballet when I was four years old and then I transitioned into modern at the end of my first grade. And then I really, in my teenagers and early 20s, loved contemporary dance. And so that was one part of my performing arts, but also I used to play the piano. And then when I was a teenager, I played the keyboard in a heavy metal band because I was very much into heavy metal.
Monica Holt: Well, that took an unexpected twist from ballet, modern, piano, to heavy metal. I like that. We love a woman of all trades. So you grew up in Italy. Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience was like for those of us living in America whose childhood might have looked a little different than yours?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah, I am from a very small town, 15,000 people. I would say pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It’s the big plain, north center, Italy. But I believe that even looking back in retrospect, I’ve been born and raised with this beauty of the architecture around me. And then I ended up studying architecture, but I kind of think that the sense of these kind of rich and historically dense aesthetic landscape really stayed with me. I also was and am an only child and my parents were both only children, so very, very small family, needed to find ways to entertain myself. And I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers. Both of them were seamstresses. And that was me growing up, plus the piano and dancing. And I also used to draw all the time, like many kids, I suppose.
Monica Holt: Oh, I love that. I heard that perhaps as a child you were constantly collecting and organizing things — buttons and textiles, you mentioned — from your grandmothers. Was that the moment that you started to think about the analytical mind and how that intersected with your artistic brain?
Giorgia Lupi: I think so. I mean, obviously right now looking back, that was a beginning of being an obsessive data collector and visual organizer, but I really loved spending time in my grandmother’s tailor shop. And in different days I would pull out all of her buttons and threads and ribbons and just organize them visually on the table according to different visual rules, like the buttons that have one hole and then two holes and three holes or the colors or the lengths. And I just really remember the satisfaction of that little exercise. And probably my parents thought, “She’s just a little OCD,” but I think that was really nice. But I also used to chart boys that I liked in late elementary school and middle school. And I had four boys that I was charting at the same time and they just got a little ranking grade every day. And so at the end you’d see some trends and you’d see a guy that was really high in the beginning, just going down, not sure what happened.
Monica Holt: This is the most scientific approach to girlhood crush that I’ve ever heard.
Giorgia Lupi: I have a visual. I have a photo that my mom gave me. I’ll send it over after in case.
Monica Holt: I love this. Well, I’m thinking of you organizing buttons and just thinking, oh, she would be really great to do a puzzle with. Because I bet that when you sit down to do a puzzle, you first look at how you line up the similar. So I love seeing how these different wheels in your brain work. Talk to me a little bit about then how you took this youth filled with analytical mindset, but maybe not formal training, and then what that turned into as you headed off to school for architecture.
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah. So at the same time that I needed to decide what to do for college, also with my dancing practice, I actually won a beautiful and kind of prestigious dance scholarship in France that I decided not to take in the end because it was a struggling decision. But when you have a fork in your life and sometimes you’re like, would I be a really fulfilled dancer? But I think I’m really happy where I am and I kept dancing afterwards. But I decided to go to school for architecture because truthfully, I didn’t know what to do as in I knew that I wanted something. I wanted to study something that had some sort of solid foundation and structure and I loved math. And so I was very drawn to that. But at the same time, I loved expressing myself creatively. And so going into fine arts seemed like one step too far in that spectrum and studying engineering or math seemed the other way around. And somehow I found studying architecture was a way to merge these two parts of my brain in a way.
Monica Holt: Yes. And I haven’t ever heard architecture described in quite that way, but it really, that’s kind of an unlock for me and how you think about that marriage of these two sides of a spectrum. But it’s also funny you say this because your curiosity shifted towards data visualization, which of course is another marriage of these two types of ways of thinking. When did you realize that your curiosities and your interests were shifting away from architecture directly?
Giorgia Lupi: I mean, I think pretty early on because within my architectural studies, obviously you could choose some electives and I was always very drawn to urban mapping. And so the art of mapping and planning the city in a way and representing things that were happening in the city in a graphic way that could abstract all these fluxes and complexity into something digestible. And then looking into similar things that existed in the world, I did discover data visualization, which to me is the same thing, just not limited to geography. And then I really fell in love with the idea of being able to represent reality through these graphic forms that could reveal something better and more precise.
Monica Holt: I’m glad you started to talk about that because I think sometimes when people hear the phrase data visualization, they’re imagining something hyper-technical and analytical, but you have been able to bring this really emotional and intimate approach into the work that you are doing. Do you remember the first time you realized that data could also be something that’s deeply human?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah, I think that perhaps it was really during the studies. And so there was this urban sociologist that I use very much as a basis for my own thesis, master’s thesis, and his name is Kevin Lynch, and he has this beautiful book that is called The Images of the City, or I think it’s a similar translation, L’immagine della città in Italian. And pretty much what he went on and did is interviewed thousands of people talking about their perceived experience of the city that they lived in. And through these thousands of interviews, he was able to map the pillars of our urban experience, whether our walks every day have some particular kind of landmarks or edges and how that shapes our perception of what we feel that it’s a neighborhood, what we feel that is our own area versus others. And I think that that fascinated me very, very much because ultimately it was really bringing human nature out into the urban studies that I was doing.
And I think I’ve always been so fascinated by human nature. I think if I didn’t study architecture or didn’t become a dancer, maybe I would’ve studied psychologies or human nature in a way. And what makes us who we are and what makes us interact in the world the way that we do. And so I think that in all of my work when I can, I try to represent people in the data because ultimately I think that’s what interests me and I think that’s how also people relate to data in general through the experience of themselves as an individual in a data set, if that makes sense.
Monica Holt: That’s really beautifully put. And it also makes sense to me because you’ve said that data is your favorite material to work with. And when you talk about it, you talk about it the way that a designer might also talk about typography or photography. I’m curious what it means to you to treat data like a material rather than just info or facts or outputs.
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah, let me try to unpack that. So I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but if we think about what is data, data to me is an obstruction of the world that we human being created because we couldn’t store reality on a hard drive. And so we needed to be able to select things to observe and to have these lens and filter in a way where we could analyze reality one subject at a time. For example, we focus on credit card transactions, we focus on documenting something specific, and so that’s like a filter. And then once you’ve collected these quantitative and hopefully also qualitative data, those elements that you have become a material that you can encode visual valuables on to represent them. And so if you think about any data visualization, you’re using shapes and colors that you give meaning to. Now there’s convention obviously for height for a certain value, but I think thinking about data as this narrative element that gives you a privileged point of view on reality and then an element that really you can use to encode any kind of visual variable with, to me it’s a way more interesting and open-ended way of thinking about it than just there’s this analytical way of representing numbers, right?
Monica Holt: Oh, I really love that idea of thinking about data as the narrative, not data as the numbers that help reinforce a narrative that already exists.
Giorgia Lupi: It’s interesting how you said because I’ve recently published a book that is called Speak Data that is a book of interviews where I didn’t only want to talk about my own view of the world of data, but together with my co-author, we interviewed experts in very different fields, not data experts, but kind of like writers, scientists, doctors. And while having them talk about their own experience in the real world with data, we also asked all of them about what is their definition of data. And I found the one from Naresh Ramchandani, who’s a writer that was a partner at Pentagram before, very interesting because, and I hope I’m going to do a good job quoting the actual definition, but “data is irrefutable points of drama in a plot of a story.” And so —
Monica Holt: I love that.
Giorgia Lupi: There are these moments and facts that are data, but ultimately there is a story that follows. And so those can be anchoring points for a bigger story. And I kind of really liked his way of thinking about it.
Monica Holt: Yes. And it’s funny when I think about the book that you mentioned, Speak Data, you write a bit in there about how the US census is a reminder that data is never totally neutral. And as we’re reframing how we think about data, that too was a similar kind of change of opinion.
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah. And in that specific example was to explain a project that we did with the Museum of the City of New York that was around the release of the 2020 census. We kind of proposed an interactive visualization where instead of focusing on the census questions that are very quantitative and limited, ask people to reflect and create their own data portraits about what make them them, whether they’re thinking that the next generation will need for a better future, how they feel in relationship to their country and their age versus where are you from and what age bracket you are. And so questions that started from the census itself, but made them really more human. And obviously, again, that was an artistic speculation to make people reflect and create these visual that collectively piled up over the course of the months. What we wanted to get with that in general, it’s also that it’s true that everybody thinks or most people think about data as this objective truth, but data is highly subjective because ultimately it’s human-made.
And even if it comes from a sensor or a device, a human being decided what to record and what to leave out. And so I think in a way, really thinking about data always as subject to some choices, it’s an important reminder. I don’t think that undermines the power of data to be able to provide really important information, but it really reminds us something about its own nature, which I think it’s just important to have as a general practice.
Monica Holt: Yes. And what you just said, the subjectivity of data, that is, I think, come into even clearer light with all of the latest kind of movement in AI and what that’s teaching us about the data that we are feeding to tools that then we are using the outputs of, and hopefully that is also helping with our recognition of that subjectivity. With that in mind, what do you think it means to be fluent in data today?
Giorgia Lupi: I think it means pretty much being able or being willing to ask yourself the questions about the things that you and I are talking about. Where do the data come from? Asking yourself when you see a chart, what are some of the things that might not have been represented here? And this is not to criticize or judge the chart itself, but just to have a critical eye on what’s the point of view because imagine that we read an article on the New York Times on a respectable outlet and we know that this article has been written by somebody. And so we take into account that as much as they want to be objective, there’s some sort of angle to that. But we see a chart and we think that that’s the truth. That’s reality. It’s numbers. I think we should just consider it the same as the article itself.
So just really encouraging to ask these critical questions and to be aware of when, for example, context might be needed to understand the particular number. And again, to also remember that these data have been collected by somebody that simply had an angle on reality that they wanted to share and understanding the complexity that sometimes I think is needed to represent reality versus an oversimplification could be good points to start. My ideal would be that people fell in love with data and treated it as a language that they can learn how to use. But I know that’s not for everybody’s career or life.
Monica Holt: Well, I think after listening to this, there’ll be a lot more folks who are feeling that way. We spoke a little bit just now about your book, but I wanted to go back for a second to one of your other well-known projects, which is Dear Data, which started out as a series of hand-drawn postcards. Tell us a little bit about that project.
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah. So Dear Data is a 52-week correspondence with this other designer — her name is Stefanie Posavec — that lives in London. I live in New York, and we only met two times at a conference, speaking at a conference before we started this weekly data correspondence in form of postcard that was sent across the oceans. And so pretty much we decided to try to get to know each other through data only. And every week we would collect our own personal data around the weekly shared mundane topic from our interaction with our partners, to the thank yous we said, to the time that we complained, to the sounds around us. And then we would draw the data visualization, hand drawn or hand paint or whatever kind of material. And so over the course of 52 weeks, first of all, we really got to know each other. We’re friends right now, and the project got pretty viral. It’s in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art right now, which is quite nice, but I think —
Monica Holt: Extraordinary.
Giorgia Lupi: No, I mean, I’m obviously way beyond happy about it, but I think what I’m even happier about is how well received it has been. We have seen thousands of people, not even designers or artists who learned about the project and really wanted to try it out. Even pairs and hundreds of them, they were able to go through all the 52 weeks, which was an insane amount of power, I think, willpower to just collect and draw and collect and draw every week. And so yeah, that’s the essence of the project.
Monica Holt: Why do you think it is that people connected so closely to it? Do you think it’s the permission that it gives folks to notice really what’s happening in their own life? What are your theories about that connection?
Giorgia Lupi: I mean, maybe a few things. I think the mundanity of it, the fact that we’re collecting very mundane topics. I make an example, in a week of complaints, collecting the time we complained, we didn’t only collect a number like I complained to a hundred times. For everyone, we added details about why, what was happening, who was I complaining to, was it even necessary? And then encoded all of these categories and qualitative data in the symbols, but it’s something kind of mundane if you think about it. It’s not like a grandiose thing. It can happen in any moment of your life. And then probably the fact, and I heard that actually quite a few times, people, because they’ve learned how to just have quantities and things to visualize, were less afraid of the white page compared to starting a drawing or a craft project from scratch and without data.
Monica Holt: Did it change at all for you the meaning of the project when it went from being one-on-one and very personal to something that then the world, it was on view for the world, all of this information about your life?
Giorgia Lupi: I always see the projects that I do as something that I hope will live a life of their own. I hope that they will get to outcomes that I don’t expect. I think that that’s the beauty of then learning more about what worked and what didn’t, what could stick around and what didn’t. I’m just really, really happy, honestly. I’ve seen incredible things that came out of it, people that have been knitting their personal data and sending it to each other, so I took it to a completely different level, and that’s kind of really inspiring.
Monica Holt: So all of this feeds into the idea of data humanism. Could you explain that phrase for all of us and what that means to you?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah. Data humanism is a combination of two words that came to me and I wanted to put out in the world a couple of years after Dear Data. I’ve been asked to write an essay around my practice on Print Magazine at the time, and I just paused and reflected and looked back at the work of my career and wanted to find a common thread. And for me, it was really, really that every project that I made tried to highlight the human aspect of data in many ways. And so trying to put together all of these things that I’ve done, I wrote this visual manifesto of what I call data humanism that ultimately is a suggestion to an approach that always remember what data stands for, which are our messy, imperfect, uncertain human lives. And even if we want to display them through metrics, all of these elements that are imperfection, uncertainty, uniqueness in a story needs to be taken into account and rendered. And so that was the origin of that data humanism word.
Monica Holt: Well, and the embrace that you have for the complexity, it’s a stirring thought when so many of us want to simplify. I like that you are looking at it through a different lens. We talk about all of this. You are now a partner at Pentagram, right? This is an iconic name in design. As you became part of Pentagram and you were thinking about all of these different inputs from your life, artistically, creatively from data viz, from all of these different areas, what perspective did you want to bring into the firm when you joined in 2019?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah, it’s been a wonderful experience. I think at that point in my career, I was kind of ready to widen a little bit the breadth of what I was doing, because as much as I think that I will always think in data, I was kind of thinking that generally representing content in a way that has a visual impact, it’s something that I was interested to explore. And I remember my partner, Paula Scher, who’s this incredibly accomplished and amazing graphic designer, at some point in the beginning of the conversation with me said, “Well, I know that formally you haven’t designed a brand identity, but what you do is visual identity because what is an identity that is visual, it’s something that is recognizable, it’s something that responds to a broad content and story and is able to translate it into visual form. It’s something that is memorable and it’s something that is there to stay.” And she said, “Well, your work does that. You’ll be a no-brainer for you to join.” And then obviously by joining, I have an amazing team of people that are brand identity designer, content strategists, digital designers. They all have a passion for data. I have a data researcher that works with me. And so I think we’re really able to have a, I would say data informed mentality and mindset to all sort of broad graphic design project that we take in. And I kind of love it and I hope that I am bringing something to the firm with this different approach.
Monica Holt: I think I can speak confidently by saying I think you bring quite a significant amount to the firm with that mentality and approach. A lot of the projects that I know Pentagram is so well loved and respected for are coming in at moments where a brand is reinventing themselves.
Giorgia Lupi: Yes.
Monica Holt: And you are coming into those rooms and I’m thinking probably have to immediately be building trust and partnership with new people every time. Can you talk a little bit about how you create these great creative partnerships with clients and with folks that you’re meeting through the work that you do?
Giorgia Lupi: Well, I think that one thing that we really always want to do is a fair and really planned amount of time, whether it’s a formal strategy aspect and deliverable of the project or a big phase of content analysis. We really immerse ourself in the world of our clients where we understand their core mission, we understand where they’re coming from, we understand who they are in the organization and what’s the vision for their own world. And I think that probably also because we care so deeply about content, because of all the work that I’ve done before, where again, before doing any data visualization, you really need to learn and immerse yourself in the content to be able to tell the story. I think to me this is where the great partnership begins, which is really making sure that before we even get to explore any design in a way, absolutely have a design brief that is a hundred percent informed by a deep understanding of the client itself.
And I know that sometimes it’s hard to fit it in a short timeline, but I really don’t think that this is a phase that can be skipped. And I think in general, great partnerships also come from great clients that have an open mind, that they are willing to be challenged in a way, that they’re willing to really trust us. And I think that’s how we start everything.
Monica Holt: That makes sense. Are there any common themes that you see in terms of what organizations uncover about themselves through these processes?
Giorgia Lupi: Well, especially if we’re talking about a rebrand, it’s really a moment in time where a client needs to take stock of what still works, of what they used to communicate to the world in the past, however, 10, 20 years, and also discover what is it they’re still attached to and what is they’re ready to let go. And I think this is a process that is really interesting to try to facilitate and not to force in a way and really to try to be good listeners. And I think that sometimes, or at least I’ve heard from younger designer that a rebrand needs to change everything because otherwise you as a designer don’t bring your own value. I really don’t believe that. I think you really need to be trusted partners to hold hands to the client that is in a moment where there’s a big change, whether it’s from the top, whether it’s from changes in the organization or in how they want to position themselves in the world, and it could be a scary and challenging moment.
And so I think that maybe a common theme is really that moment of reflection where as an entry point, a lot of clients come and they seem to be super, super open to change everything. And then the more that you guide them through the process, the more simply they recognize that they’re still attached to part of the previous way of describing or visualizing themselves and that they’re not willing to let go. And I think that then our job is informed by the strategy and informed by what we think is the right move for where they want to go. Again, we try to guide them. I see our work obviously in creating a visual world and a verbal world for them to use, but also really to try to translate what they already know and do very well into, again, the world of identity expression.
Monica Holt: Well, it’s also interesting for us to be thinking about what distinctly human design means in this moment where we know that we are part of conversations about the role of generative AI and how that can work to our advantage, but also how we distinguish what is necessary in terms of the human personal viewpoint. How do you think about that alongside the future of design and as you’re thinking through projects like this ones or others that you have in the pipeline?
Giorgia Lupi: That’s a really good question. And I think especially when I talk to students in a way, I have a very strong point of view on the fact that AI can be used for many things that can be useful to optimize and maybe shorten some execution time, but absolutely not to generate ideas. And so I kind of think that in general, I am a little worried about the flattening of the quality, the flattening of a spectrum of storytelling and narrative in general with generative AI. I have a team that I hire because of a reason, because of all of their personal ways of parsing the world through their own eyes, through their own brains, through their own references, and then being able to be a generator of ideas with me because of their very specifically looking at the world versus a broad poll.
Monica Holt: Exactly.
Giorgia Lupi: They actually will always, I think, end up feeling pretty generic even if you are very good at prompting. But I mean, I think that I also don’t want to be that person that says, “Oh, I wish we could get back to the world before AI.” Maybe personally I could say that, but I think we can’t escape it. And I think it’s really just about maintaining the critical thinking on when it’s good to use it or not.
Monica Holt: Right. And you don’t want it to interfere with what is authentically who you are. As you are looking at the future and looking at what’s next, what are you curious about? What stories do you want to be a part of and do you want to be telling?
Giorgia Lupi: Yeah. I mean, I think especially right now and coming from the last things that we touched upon, anything that can help us get closer to our own human nature, to be honest, and anything that can help us get back or get a renewed sense of who we are. This is something that has always interested me as we were talking about, but I think especially right now where it is so easy to prompt ourselves out in any way to get a shortcut, to get a frictionless answer. I think that the rediscovery of what makes us unique for ourself when it comes to what stories we want to tell. And I mean, I think that there’s a really big place for craft and physicality right now. I myself have started really painting for the first time with a making for the sake of making attitude and not to make it become a process.
And I think that that is also something that, especially for the creative practice and designers, the making for the sake of making, it’s something super important. So I think that in general, these are things that interest me. For the world, obviously there’s big international crisis, being part of the climate conversation, being able to, I think, help people grasp the impact of climate change in more local basis is something that interests me because getting back a little bit into data visualization, it’s hard for us human to relate to big numbers. And so it’s hard for us to relate to 1.5 degrees in our… For many years of temperature rising. But when we are able to see and quantify the consequences in our own lives, such as the butterflies you won’t see anymore because they’re migrating due to climate change, the birds that you can’t see anymore, or the cities that you might not be able to visit anymore because it’ll be sinking, those kind of stories that mixes the aggregate and the local, and again, gets to be relatable from a human perspective are stories that interest me.
I’m also generally interested in health and how our health can benefit from these new AI technologies without taking the agency away from us ourselves and from the people that are the wise keepers of knowledge. And so I think from a communication perspective, the hyperhuman and these two big challenges are something that I think I have in mind. Obviously, anything that has to do with arts and culture is my passion, and I think that there’s a space for that conversation so much so too.
Monica Holt: Well, and I think all of what you’ve mentioned plays beautifully together in the sandbox of creating that shared future. So I support all of those endeavors and I look forward to seeing how you help us view the world as we move forward. Giorgia, we have come to the end of our time together, which means it’s time for a little quickfire culture questionnaire. So to start, what is one piece of culture right now — and that can be a TV show, a book, a performance, an Instagram reel — that you are currently obsessed with?
Giorgia Lupi: If I have to be really honest about my current obsession, it’s about something that might not be considered very popular culture, but it’s my Ashtanga yoga practice. It’s a very specific type of yoga that I do every morning where you pretty much repeat the same sequence over and over and it’s the most traditional form of yoga. And there’s so much that goes into your own nervous system, spirituality, physicality, and life into this practice that right now my Instagram feed is pretty skewed through that and readings about it. But I think it’s like, again, maybe comes back to that in this world that is completely digital, I come back to real physical practice and craft, but that’s what I’m obsessed about right now.
Monica Holt: It’s a great obsession. If you could go back in time, what is a performance that you would’ve wanted to attend?
Giorgia Lupi: I actually was thinking about it because I knew we were going to ask this question. And I think that to me is Italo Calvino reading Invisible Cities. That was the early 80s, probably 1983 at Columbia. And at that point he was already writing what would become The Six Amendments for the Next Millennium, which is another really beautiful book. Thinking what literature is and what it is for, what does it mean? That is kind of the room where I would want to be.
Monica Holt: That is an excellent response. What is one free resource in any field that everyone should check out?
Giorgia Lupi: I think I want to say generally the Letter Forum Archive and their online collection. It’s a beautiful century-spanning of graphic design that is fully available online. I think even just for a pleasant visual experience, it’s really something I’d recommend.
Monica Holt: Wonderful suggestion. Our final question today is if you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leaders, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations today, what would that message be?
Giorgia Lupi: I think it’s more a message of appreciation and support than a message of change because I think that arts organizations right now are really what are keeping us human. And I think I would say to keep making work that is in alignment with their core mission and values and not driven by any cultural trend. Keep being weird and surprising and challenging and keep bringing us collective joy.
Monica Holt: Giorgia, what an absolute delight. Thank you for the time.
Giorgia Lupi: Thank you, Monica. This was a wonderful conversation.
Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to Arts Unscripted. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show. And if you haven’t already, click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some great episodes coming your way and I don’t want you to miss them. A huge thanks to our team behind the scenes, including Karen McConarty, Yeaye Stemn, Stephanie Medina, Jess Berube, and Rachel Purcell Fountain. Don’t forget to follow Capacity on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for Capacity’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com. And I hope you’ll reach out to us and let us know what you think and who you’d like to hear from next on Arts Unscripted. I’m Monica Holt. Thanks for listening.
Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning information designer whose work synthesizes data and storytelling in innovative ways to create unique and singular brand expressions.
In her practice, she designs engaging data-driven visual narratives across print, digital and environmental media that create new insight and appreciation of people, ideas, and organizations. Her vibrant and inspiring design work empowers leading global organizations to achieve their mission through data-driven storytelling and reflects her belief that data has the capacity to make us all more human—advancing our intelligence, engagement, and delight.
One of the most lauded designers of her generation and a prominent voice in the field of data design, Lupi was the 2022 recipient of the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the first data visualization practitioner ever to be named in its communication design category. In 2022 she also received an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Across her career, Lupi has built rich, visually driven experiences around data for international clients such as Google, the Gates Foundation, Verizon, IBM, Deloitte and Starbucks. Recent cultural clients include MoMA, TED, Triennale Milano Design Museum and Getty Museum. She has designed custom data visualizations for national and international publications like The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A proponent of using data to help bring awareness to some of the world’s most pressing problems, non-profit clients and causes include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, World Health Organization and United Nations.
Lupi was born in Italy and received her Master’s degree in architecture from Università di Ferrara and her PhD from Politecnico di Milano, where she focused on information mapping. In 2011, she co-founded Accurat, an acclaimed data-driven research, design and innovation firm with offices in Milan and New York. She joined Pentagram as a partner in 2019.
Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and she has been commissioned for original art installations also by MoMA, Museum of the City of New York, New York Botanical Garden and TED. A former MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, she is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on New Metrics and a Fellow of the RSA.
Her TED Talk on her humanistic approach to data has over one million views. She has published four books: Speak Data (Princeton Architectural Press, 2025), exploring data as a language with a range of perspectives from experts across disciplines; This Is Me and Only Me (Corraini Edizioni, 2024), a children’s book introducing the concept of data to kids; Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), a guided journal for collecting visual data; and Dear Data (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), exploring the details of daily life through hand-drawn visual data. Lupi has been featured in international media including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, T Magazine, Vogue and Vanity Fair.