Alexandra Zsigmond

Alexandra Zsigmond is an award-winning art director and visual thinker working at the intersection of fine art, illustration and editorial design.

 

Her core interest lies in the use of metaphor and symbolism in visual art, as a tool to represent complex ideas and visualize the invisible realms of mind, thought, and emotion. Since writing her honors thesis on visual metaphor at Stanford University in 2004, she has explored this interest through multiple roles and media: as art director, curator, and designer of metaphoric imagery for newspapers, books and exhibitions.

 

From 2010-17 she was an art director for the New York Times’ Opinion section, commissioning original illustration for articles, curating art-driven features, and designing for both print and digital. She has collaborated with a roster of over 1000 artists worldwide and art directed over 4000 editorial illustrations. She is known for greatly expanding the range of visual contributors to the Times, drawing equally from the worlds of contemporary illustration, fine art, animation, and comics. As an art director, she strives to push artists toward the creation of their best, most original work, and toward visual solutions that are at once striking, incisive, and experimental.

 

She is a frequent public speaker and has given talks at universities, conferences, and museums throughout Europe, South America, Canada and the United States.

Originally from San Francisco and of Hungarian/Greek descent, Alexandra has a background in classical and modern dance, and has worked as an arts coordinator or designer for a variety of notable art organizations, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cabinet Magazine, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.