Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi (born 1981) is an Italian information designer, a partner at design firm Pentagram, and co-founder of research and design firm Accurat. She is the recipient of 2022 Cooper-Hewitt American National Design Award for her innovative work in information design and author of multiple books, including Dear Data, a collection of hand drawn data visualizations co-authored with Stefanie Posavec.

Early life and education Lupi was born in 1981 in Finale Emilia outside of Modena, Italy. When she was a little girl she would spend a significant amount of time collecting and organizing all kinds of items into folders: colored sheets of papers, tiny stones, pieces of textiles from her grandmothers buttons, sales receipts and so much more grew in her collection. She has said she took pleasure in organizing and categorizing her treasures based on their sizes, colour, and dimensions. She has said that her childhood interest in numbers, cataloguing and classifying rules and systems explains the origin of her work and her desire to play with data. These interests have also included the scales of large cities and urban mapping projects, and representing information layers underlining an architecture project.

She graduated from University of Ferrara in Ferrara, Italy, where she studied architecture. She stated she was not sure of a right career path at the time of entering college, and applying to study architecture was her “way of not choosing.” In Lupi’s view, architect's job is not to build buildings, but design representations of buildings, images of building's following a system of symbols that convey information about how to manufacture them.

After graduating, she worked with two different interaction design firms in Italy, mostly on interactive installations and mapping projects showing off difficult systems of knowledge. In 2011 she began her PhD in design at Milan Politecnico and started Accurat. In 2012 she moved to New York City, where she is still based as of 2025.

Lupi's influences for her work come from fascinations by geometrical feel and balance of abstract art compositions. Lupi's work has been influenced by data visualization and data art by Moritz Stefaner, Aaron Koblin and Jer Thorp. in which she introduced the concept of "data humanism", which she further developed in her 2017 TED Talk, the recording of which has been viewed over 1.4 million times as of 2025. Lupi gave multiple talks and interviews on the subject since then and is widely acclaimed as the pioneer and popularizer of the "data humanism" philosophy.

Pentagram In 2019, Lupi left Accurat and joined the New York office of design firm Pentagram as a partner.

Long Covid In December 2023, she published her experience with Long Covid as a visual story in The New York Times.

Awards 2022: National Design Award by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 2015: Information is Beautiful Awards - Gold Medal and Most Beautiful Project. 2013: Information is Beautiful Awards - Gold Medal, category: Data Visualization. 2013: Strata Conference - Data Journalism Award. 2013: Cannes Festival - Bronze Lion, Direct Advertising.