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by Nancy A. Austin (Author)
The first design schools in America were founded by women, for women. The Women Who Founded RISD introduces the remarkable leaders who established the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877 to upskill women for a rapidly changing industrial economy. These founders took women who already believed in the power of design and showed them how to monetize their skills within the professional workplace. The challenges they overcame provide a vital blueprint for today's tech-driven environment, where empowering women requires more than just encouragement-it requires strategic agency and technical fluency.
Based on Dr. Nancy Austin's 2009 Brown University PhD thesis, this volume interrogates the entwined histories of art, engineering, and entrepreneurship. Today, Dr. Austin applies this foundational research on industrial transformation to her work as a Forensic Strategist and Resilience Architect, helping modern leaders navigate the 'administrative nexus' and stay 'Left of Boom.'Author Biography
Dr. Nancy Austin is a design historian, educator, and leadership coach based in Rhode Island. From 1985- to 2008, she taught critical histories of art and industrial design at RISD, Yale, and WPI, before transitioning in 2009 to employment as a consultant and empowerment coach. Nancy continues to contribute to and collaborate with a broad range of non-profit cultural institutions and initiatives. As a scholar, Dr. Austin's work considers the relationship between art and design. A particular focus is how women understood design as a possible vehicle for the pursuit of economic independence and personal liberty in the face of cultural and technological change. Since the early 1990, she has given conference papers about and published scholarship on the history of RISD and Rhode Island's art world. She contributed "Educating American Designers for Industry, 1853--1903," to The Cultivation of American Artists: Education and the Commerce of Art in 19th--century America, ed. Diana Korzenik. (American Antiquarian Society, 1997). She received her Ph.D. from Brown University with a thesis on the entrepreneurial women who founded RISD.
