Amy Stafford

Amy Stafford (USA) is an award winning identity designer, artist, educator and writer. Stafford studied fine art, photography and critical theory at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her Masters Degree in Fine Art from Maryland Institute, College of Art Department of Photography. After working in San Francisco in the fields of graphic design and branding for several years, she moved to Berlin, Germany in 2000 to become the creative director for Arthesia, a Swiss/German branding think tank.

In 2003 Stafford launched Studio Blixa 6, an independent creative agency focusing on identity development and design for artists, non-profits and cultural game changers.   Her writing on art, architecture, design and contemporary culture appears in books and periodicals worldwide, including The Freelance Designers Handbook (Fishel, Rotovision, 2009), Dwell, The New Art Examiner and Surface Magazine where she was also the arts editor from 1996-2000. Stafford has recently lectured at Kaospilots (Aarhus, DK), Humboldt University (Berlin), Touro College (Berlin) and taught at both L4 Akademie and the Art Institute’s Study Abroad Program in Berlin. Additionally, her fine artwork has been widely exhibited, with solo and group exhibits in cities including Berlin, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle and around the Bay Area.

Stafford is an active advisor to several cultural institutions including Sugarhigh.de and LUCKY TRIMMER e.V where she sits on the board of directors, functioning in the roles of designer, strategist and curator of the internationally acclaimed dance performance festival. In 2009 she organized an evening symposium called LUCKY THINKING with leading performers, thinkers and dance curators to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the LUCKY TRIMMER series. She is currently working on a web-based research tool bringing together site specific graffiti arts and archaeology with the Max Planck Institute for Scientific History in Berlin.