Shanshan Cui

Shanshan Cui is a designer, painter, front end web developer, and educator. She has more than two decades of design practice in both print and electronic media. She worked as senior designer and/or art director in several companies including Meredith Corp. and Terra Lycos. She continues her design practices as a consultant and independent designer after joining academia. Her clients included high tech startups, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, as well as established corporations such as Novartis, General Motors, etc.

Being a well-rounded designer, Prof. Cui has expertise in cognitive science, user behavior, and human computer interaction. She authored two books – Web Design Fundamentals, published by Chongqing University Press, China in 2011 and Online Personal Branding – for Artists and Designers, which will be published in 2020. She is a member of the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership at George Mason University. In 2019 she led a collaborative project to design and develop an online application to visualize biological data, supported by the OSCAR Summer Impact Grant. Lately, she has been focusing on visual storytelling, employing traditional art, design, and AI technology to create both static and dynamic narratives.

Prof. Cui is currently an associate professor in the School of Art and Design at George Mason University. She is the founding faculty of the Web Design curriculum and has been teaching Web Design courses since 2008. Before joining Mason, she was an assistant professor at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She also taught at Iowa State University and at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China.

Prof. Cui received her BFA in Graphic Design and her MFA in Interior Design from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China. She earned her MFA in Graphic Design from Iowa State University in 1998.

Degrees

• MFA, Graphic Design, Iowa State University

Specialist Areas:

• Design Methods and Principles
• Graduate Design Seminar
• Visual Storytelling
• Web Design