Dori Griffin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Art + Art History
College of the Arts
Dori Griffin is a design historian and visual communications designer whose work bridges scholarly research and creative practice. Griffin is recognized for her pioneering contributions to the global field of design history and her commitment to equity in design education and practice.
Griffin’s research explores the intersection of popular visual culture, identity and narrative. She researches, writes about and teaches design and its culturally embedded histories. Her scholarship is grounded in the belief that “designed systems of communication – intentional selections and arrangements of image, typography and content – are formative in how we understand ourselves and perceive others.” This philosophy underpins her transdisciplinary approach, which draws from both historical analysis and design practice.
Her first book, Mapping Wonderlands: Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912–1962, published in 2013, examined how commercial cartographic imagery shaped perceptions of place. Her second book, Type Specimens: A Visual History of Typesetting and Printing, published in 2022, is the first global study of type specimens, featuring examples from 24 countries and 15 scripts. The book was praised for its groundbreaking analysis of global typographic exchange and its innovative image selections.
She has published widely in leading journals such as Journal of Design History, Design and Culture and Visible Language. Her work has been recognized with the 2019 Design Incubation Educator’s Award for Published Research. As associate editor for Design and Culture, she introduced pedagogy as a formal category of design practice.
In 2024, Griffin co-curated Type Out Loud, a national invitational show of socially engaged typographic printing hosted by the University of Central Florida Gallery, where she designed and installed a 30-foot graphic timeline of typography in the United States and a zine- format gallery guide.
Currently, Griffin leads Immigration, Visualized, a collaborative research project exploring the visual culture of immigration in the 20th-century U.S., mentoring emerging scholars from underrepresented regions.
“Dr. Griffin is raising the bar for what is possible in her field,” said Elizabeth Ross, director of UF’s School of Art + Art History. “Her research shows that if we pay attention to how we communicate, we can do so in new, effective and inclusive ways.”