Known for her love of typography,[1] Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art.

degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA),[2][3] where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking.

[7][10] Lupton attended Cooper Union College in 1981 as a fine art student, where she discovered graphic design and the "expressive potential of typography.

It was the thing you did if you were very 'neat,' which I wasn't.”[7] After graduating, Lupton was offered a position as curator of the newly-founded Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography.

[7] These exhibits provided an arena in which "objects, images, and text functioned as both the method of communication and the subject of inquiry.

"[10] She has cited Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault as informing her (albeit more populist) work.