American Swedish Institute

The American Swedish Institute (ASI) has selected Dr. Molly Wright Steenson as its next president and chief executive officer. She will assume her role in July 2023.

Dr. Steenson is an internationally recognized author, academic leader, and keynote speaker. She joins the ASI community from Carnegie Mellon University, where she has served as vice provost for faculty, associate professor in the School of Design and the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technology. She is tenured in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, holds an affiliate appointment in the School of Architecture, and was previously senior associate dean for research in the College of Fine Arts. Dr. Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press), which explores the history of design, architecture, and AI.

Prior to Carnegie Mellon, she was an assistant tenure-track professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a visiting researcher at the Umeå University HUMLab in Umeå, Sweden, and a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. Before her career in academia, Dr. Steenson worked in San Francisco, New York, and Munich with the Web and burgeoning social media in the 1990s and early 2000s as one of the first user experience designers.

Dr. Steenson holds a PhD in architecture from Princeton University, a Master’s in environmental design from the Yale School of Architecture, and a BA in German literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Ben Tobin led this search with Ryan Leichenauer and Maria Connor.