Grace Hawthorne
Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school
Grace is an entrepreneur, artist, author and educator. She is the creator and founder of Paper Punk, a new creativity toy + tool for people of all ages. Previously, she co-founded ReadyMade, the groundbreaking design magazine for GenXY. As its CEO/Publisher she showed people how to transform ordinary objects into extraordinary design and turned the hip indie start-up into a nationally recognized lifestyle brand. In 2006, she led the sale of ReadyMade to Meredith Corporation (NASDAQ: MDP) and continued as its President/Publisher until 2009. She also co-authored the award winning book, ReadyMade: How to Make Almost Everything (Crown/Potter, 2005).
Since high school, Grace has launched five businesses dedicated to her life mission: The marriage of art and commerce. She loves keeping people connected to the tangible world by encouraging them to make things with their hands, and knows that to learn anything, you have to live it. And from the diversity of those experiences, truly ingenious and creative solutions reveal themselves.
She comes to the d.school with awe and admiration for its dedication to changing the world one mind at a time. At the d.school she is spearheading Creative Gym, a new experimental studio focused on honing design intuition and creative confidence. In conjunction with this course, Grace is currently conducting a research project about the impact and sustainability of creative capacity building at Stanford. In addition, she’s helping to build a publishing engine that can exponentially spread the impact of the d.’s transformational work.
Grace graduated cum laude from UC Berkeley in Visual Communication/Art, holds an MBA from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum’s Triennial, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, PMCA Design Biennial in Pasadena, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. Grace has also been a board member of the University Art Museum, Humanities West, and SFMoMA’s Media Arts Council.
When she’s not busy prototyping her next venture or crashing the d.school, you may find her taking a hike, eating cheese, practicing cello, or hanging at the beach with her two kids while her husband paddleboards the Pacific.
