Kristin Gecan

Kristin Gecan is Assistant Dean and Senior Director of Content at the Institute of Design, first coming to ID in 2018. She leads all editorial strategy, content operations, and public-facing thought leadership for ID—commissioning and editing institutional research reports and books, producing and hosting the With Intent podcast, leading content efforts for Shapeshift and other events, and building the content ecosystem that connects ID’s graduate school, research labs, and executive programs into a coherent public presence.

Her work at ID includes flagship publications such as Impact By Design (2026), Where Must Design Go Next? (2023), and “Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI” (2024), as well as partnerships with Fortune, Google Arts & Culture, the Chicago Humanities, the New European Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus Centennial. She led the Institute of Design’s rebrand with COLLINS, which received seven international industry awards and a US design patent.

Kristin is also a PhD researcher at the Institute of Design, where her work examines how ekphrastic co-writing and multiliteracies pedagogy can cultivate design literacy and strengthen human agency in AI-augmented environments. She has presented her research at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, the Writing Innovation Symposium, and the Image Conference, and will present at the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference at TU Delft in 2026. She received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Seventeenth International Conference on The Image.

Kristin holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, where she was a Corbel Scholarship recipient, and a BA in English and French from Illinois Wesleyan University. She also teaches Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at North Central College.

Industry Experience

Before joining ID, Kristin served as Associate Director of Editorial at the University of Chicago’s in-house creative agency (2014–2018), where she led editorial teams producing award-winning annual reports, websites, fundraising materials, and strategic communications for university leadership. Prior to that, she served as Interim Media and Marketing Director at the Poetry Foundation (2009–2014), directing all communications for one of the largest literary organizations in the world and growing its social media audience to more than 340,000 followers across four platforms.