Chappell Ellison

Director of Strategy, Launch by NTT Data

Chappell Ellison is a digital and content strategist with 15 years of experience building and delivering digital experiences for some of the most interesting companies in the world. She’s passionate about sitting down with people to untangle complex problems and make things better. Before moving into software development, she led the content strategy discipline at Huge, a Brooklyn-based creative agency. She was also a civil servant for the New York City government, where she learned the importance of design as a service job and why your vote always, always matters. Chappell is proud to be part of the founding class of the Design Writing, Research, & Criticism MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, where she began her longstanding commitment to writing about design. She served as the design columnist at Good Magazine, built out the archives at the Museum of Modern Art, and won AIGA’s Winterhouse Award for Design Writing & Criticism for her essay about the challenge of designing for people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In her spare time, she’s probably thinking about systems design, playing the latest open world video game, reading Terry Pratchett and Ursule Le Guin books, or throwing sandbags around the gym. She’s also a guest lecturer and teacher — she currently teaches writing courses at the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.