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The School of Visual Arts celebrates another milestone this year, holding its 50th annual commencement exercises on Thursday, May 15, at 1:00pm in New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. Steven Heller, celebrated design author, educator, and co-founder and chair emeritus of the College’s MFA Design program, will deliver the address and receive an honorary doctorate of fine arts.

“My over 45-year relationship with my SVA collaborators, colleagues, faculty, and students has offered an unmatched opportunity to find and grow my life’s eclectic and curious passions,” Heller said. “SVA is more than a college of visual arts; it is a cultural experiment and social laboratory where, over time and fluxes in fashions and technologies, values are measured by the unique consequences of contributions its makers put into the real world for the real world.”

Heller has a long, consequential history with SVA and its design and illustration disciplines. He briefly attended the College in the 1960s as a young illustrator before leaving for the then-thriving world of underground and alternative newspapers. In 1974, he joined The New York Times, where he spent more than three decades as an art director and writer. He has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 200 books on design, illustration, and typography, and contributed to publications such as The Atlantic, Wired, and Print, for which he now serves as partner and editor. His honors include the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the Smithsonian National Design Award, and the SVA Masters Series Award and Exhibition, as well as honorary doctorates from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic. He is also a member of the Art Directors Club and One Club Educators Hall of Fame.

Heller taught his first SVA class on newspaper design in the late ’60s and became a perennial faculty member in 1984. With Lita Talarico (MFA 2007 Art Criticism and Writing), he co-founded the MFA Design program in 1998. He was instrumental in developing several other SVA degree programs, including MPS Branding and MFA Design Criticism (now MA Design Research, Writing, and Criticism). Heller retired as MFA Design co-chair in 2024, though he continues to teach at the College while serving as special assistant to SVA President David Rhodes. 

The 50th annual School of Visual Arts commencement exercises will celebrate the achievements of some 1,151 degree candidates enrolled in the College’s 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. For more information, visit sva.edu/commencement.