Kelli Anderson

Kelli Anderson is a graphic artist and paper engineer who works with a wide range of mediums including infographics, branding design, pop up books and risograph animations. She has taught art and graphic design at Cooper Union, NYU, and SFPC, given a TED talk on disruptive art,^[1] and has published 3 books.^[2] Her work has been published by NPR,^[3] MoMA, Chronicle Books, and The New Yorker.^[4]

Kelli Anderson
Born	New Orleans, LA
Nationality	American
Education	BFA, MFA, MS
Alma mater	Pratt Institute
Notable work	This Book is a Camera, This Book is a Planetarium
Style	Conceptual Art, Graphic Design
Website	https://kellianderson.com

Education

Anderson received a BFA at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, followed by an MFA and MS at the Pratt Institute of New York. She wrote her master's thesis on nuclear waste markers.^[5][6]

Career

In 2013 Anderson illustrated The Human Body,^[7] a children's app by Tinybop Inc.^[8]

Anderson collaborated as a graphic designer with The Yes Men on a counterfeit New York Times newspaper. The hoax involved blanketing New York City with fake editions of the paper completely rewritten with articles describing a utopian present reality.^[9] Anderson also designed for publications related to Occupy Wall Street.^[10]

In 2015, Anderson was granted the Adobe Creative Residency^[11] which included being a keynote speaker at Adobe Max.^[12] She also spent five years working part-time in Special Collections at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan,^[13] and as an Osher Fellow at Exploratorium.

Anderson's work spans a broad range of digital and tangible mediums, and from the playful to the political or a mix of both.^[6] Her infographics include Buying a Gun in America for Mayors Against Illegal Guns,^[14] which addressed the ease with which a gun can be obtained. Anderson is also well known for her interactive paper work such as “The Paper Record Player”, a wedding invitation that plays music; and her books "This Book Is a Planetarium" and "This Book is a Camera" which was published by the MoMA.^[15][16] In 2013, she created the installation Book Covers, Re-imagined in Paper, a 100% paper installation done for the New York City Public Library with Maria Popova.^[17] Anderson has taught paper engineering at Cooper Union^[18] as well as typography and risograph animation.

There is a strong theme of bringing the 2 dimensional to life in Anderson's work, exemplified in her sculptural paper pieces and pop-ups. This theme is also evident in her animation work where a handcrafted quality is often present such as in her work for NPR's video "Talking While Female"^[3] or her music video for They Might be Giants which used a combination of stop motion and compositing techniques.^[19] Even when working with the purely digital, such as creating interactive anatomy for the Tinybop Human Body app, Anderson's work retains a quality of texture and tangibility.^[20][21] She has also designed for Russ n' Daughters and Momofuku, and Munchery.^[22]

Recently, she has been a featured speaker at MIT Media Lab^[23] and animated in collaboration with Yo Yo Ma on a series of Richard Feynman poems.^[24]

Works

• The Human Body, published by Tinybop Inc. (2003)^[25]
• This Book is a Planetarium, published by Chronicle Books (2017)^[26]
• This Book is a Camera, published by MoMA (2018)^[27]
• Powers of Ten, with Adam Pickard (2022)^[28]
• Alphabet in Motion, An ABC Pop-up Book on How Letters Get their Shape (Summer 2025)^[29]

Awards

• Nominated for the Cooper Hewitt / Smithsonian National Design Award (in Communication Design), 2023
• Ars Electronica Award of Distinction, 2009^[30]