“We will approach it as one might a second language,” she explained, “introducing theory and practice, defining visual grammar, reframing expression, construction, and craft.” With Andrew Howard and Hamish Muir, Helfand was a co-founder of the summer editorial course in Porto, Portugal.
Her critically acclaimed Scrapbooks: An American History (Yale University Press, 2008) was named "the best of this year’s gift books" by The New York Times.
Culture is Not Always Popular, a fifteen-year anthology of Design Observer was co-edited by Michael Bierut and Jarrett Fuller, and was published by MIT Press in 2018.
Appointed by the Postmaster General to the U.S. Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee in 2006, Jessica Helfand chaired the Design Subcommittee until 2012.
She is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and, with William Drenttel, held the first Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2010.
A 2018 Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri and a 2019 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Jessica Helfand was the winter 2020 Artist in Residence at the California Institute of Technology.
As a comparatively early practitioner working with technology in her studio practice, Jessica Helfand has been invited to participate in several conversations about AI and its relationship to the creative process.
This work—the work of deep character study— is enlivened by research in general, and by primary sources in particular: letters, diaries, photographs, and ephemera provide a kind of material affirmation, documentary evidence hinting at the contours of a person’s imagined (but believable) human experience.
Helfand’s most recent exhibition, The Service Society—a series of portraits based on the Irish domestic servants who were employed by a number of wealthy American families during the Gilded Age— is informed by extensive archival research.