Judith Dupré

Judith Dupré
Born Providence, Rhode Island
Nationality American
Occupation Author
Website Judith Dupré

Judith Dupré (born in Providence, Rhode Island)[1] is a writer, architectural historian, and public speaker. She is the New York Times bestselling author of several works of narrative nonfiction on art, design, and architecture. She has been described as “a scholar with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style.” [2]

The Official Biographer of One World Trade Center, she is the author of One World Trade Center: Biography of the Building (2016). She is only author given unfettered access to the Trade Center site, team, and archives by The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Dupré presents the story of the new World Trade Center in its entirety: from Mayor Rudy Giulianis vow to rebuild on September 12, 2001, through the complex, often contentious interactions between multiple public and private agencies with a stake in the project, to the placing of One World Trade Center’s spire in 2013. The book incorporates over seventy interviews with major participants, including architects David M. Childs, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, and Michael Arad.

Her books have been translated into eleven languages. Their unusual shapes and bindings echo their subject matter,[3] and honor the tradition and material presence of the illuminated book.[4] Skyscrapers is 18” high.[5] Bridges is a yard wide when open, to accommodate its panoramic photos of the longest structures.[6] The cover of Churches is split down the center so that it opens like the doors of a cathedral.[7] The cover of Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory is a replica, in raised relief, of ancient stones; its title lettering was drawn for the book by Nicholas Benson.[2] Each page design includes deep-captioned photographs, floating quotations, and sidebar explorations.[8] The page layouts suggest a kinetic reading experience beyond the turning of successive pages, and have been designed to create individualized reading experiences, where the reader chooses how to engage the array of images, essays and marginal commentaries.[9]

The National Endowment for the Humanities named Dupré an inaugural Public Scholar in 2015.[10] She has received awards and fellowships from Yale University, New York State Council on the Arts, U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the NYS Foundation for the Arts. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists’ colony in the U.S. In 2004, the Westchester Arts Council awarded her the Artists Award, the county’s highest cultural honor, citing her as a “champion of the arts and literacy.”

Dupré was born into a family of architectural preservationists.[3] She earned a M.Div. from Yale Divinity School in 2011. She is a fellow of Saybrook College at Yale University and a Dominique de Menil scholar at the Institute of Sacred Music, also at Yale. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1978 and did postgraduate work at Hunter College and the Open Atelier of Design and Architecture, both in New York City.[[11]]

Dupré serves on the boards of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s Skyscraper Center Editorial Board; and Faith & Form, a journal of the American Institute of Architect’s Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture. She has curated and consulted on numerous contemporary art exhibitions, including an installation of temporary refugee housing on Sterling Quad at Yale Divinity School in 2007.[11] From 1979 through 1990,[12] she curated the Harry N. Abrams Art Collection, an important collection of Pop Art assembled by the art book publisher Harry Abrams.

Publications

Dupré's major works include:

References

  1. Brief autobiography at judithdupre.com
  2. 1 2 Strauss, Barry. “Carved in Stone: On Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory by Judith Dupré,” The New Criterion, vol. 26, March, 2008, 69.
  3. 1 2 Gonzalez, Susan. “Divinity Student’s Books Pay Homage to Architectural Marvels” Yale Bulletin & Calendar 36:27, April 25, 2008, 6.
  4. Frederick M. Winship, "Churches Architecture is Subject of New Books," United Press International, October 18, 2001.
  5. Lucie Young, "A Book Shaped Like Its Subject Matter,” The New York Times, September 26, 1996, C3.
  6. DeLony, Eric (1998). "Bridges". IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 24 (2): 56. JSTOR 40968442.
  7. Larry B. Stammer, “Houses of the Holy,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2002, pp 8, 9.
  8. Patricia Dane Rogers, “Vertical Reality,” The Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1996, 5.
  9. Prescott, Theodore. “Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory,” American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2008.
  10. 10
  11. 1

External links

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