CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
For more than four decades, women have shaped AIGA NY through service, continuity and shared authority—offering the wider design industry a model built to help other people thrive.
The design industry spent decades reserving its most influential rooms for a narrow idea of who could lead. Yet exclusion had an unintended consequence. Women who could not easily enter the established model began building different structures—ones that treated leadership less as a performance of certainty and more as a responsibility to create conditions in which others could succeed.
AIGA NY makes that change unusually visible. Women have shaped the country’s largest local AIGA chapter for more than 43 years, not as isolated exceptions but as the organisation’s continuing foundation. Its history shows what happens when authority is passed forward, questioned and rebuilt instead of being concentrated in one charismatic figure.
Creative Boom’s Women’s History Month conversation brought together Sarah Williams, the chapter’s current president; Stacey Panousopoulos, its executive director; and three former presidents: Chelsea Goldwell, Lyanne Dubon-Aguilar and Jennifer Kinon. Their reflections are not a simple victory story. Together, they examine who has been expected to perform leadership, which doors remain closed and what the next generation should inherit.
Power Without the Performance
Rather than accepting the familiar image of a solitary visionary who commands every room, these leaders question the image itself. Williams, AIGA NY’s president and co-CEO of Beardwood&Co, argues that the industry has often confused authority with volume. Anyone who did not naturally project that kind of certainty faced a choice: imitate it or risk being judged as less capable.
At Zero Studios, partner and creative director Goldwell offers a more useful comparison. She sees a creative leader as closer to a basketball coach: someone who provides direction and energy while designing systems that allow the whole team to perform. This is not the traditional hierarchy made friendlier. It relocates the purpose of power, from controlling people to equipping them.
Williams sees evidence that this approach is gaining credibility. Results, strong work and community-building can establish authority without theatrical dominance. A designer at Beardwood described encountering a form of female leadership that did not imitate command-and-control culture. Williams, in turn, attributes that experience to the women on her team and the way they practise those values daily.
The distinction matters because collaborative leadership is sometimes mistaken for reduced ambition. In these accounts, the opposite is true. Standards remain demanding, but success is measured partly by whether other people gain clarity, confidence and room to contribute—not by how visibly the leader occupies the centre.
A Lineage Built Over Decades
AIGA NY’s leadership culture cannot be traced to a single appointment or breakthrough year. It grew through a chain of women who made the chapter stronger and more open. Kinon, who founded Champions Design and led AIGA NY between 2008 and 2012, looks back to Paula Scher as a founding member and early president, and remembers Emily Oberman’s unmistakable presence at chapter events.
Kinon also credits Carin Goldberg with bringing firmness, fairness and greater coherence to the organisation’s identity. Goldberg recruited Panousopoulos, who has now served as executive director for nearly half of AIGA NY’s existence. One thoughtful appointment therefore influenced decades of stewardship—an example of leadership expressed through the people selected and trusted to continue the work.
Panousopoulos describes the inheritance less as a collection of techniques than as care for a living community. Dubon-Aguilar experienced the same principle when she joined the board under Ida Woldemichael, whose instinct was to invite discussion and ask what the chapter might become. Continuity here does not mean preserving everything unchanged; it means giving each generation enough trust to revise the institution responsibly.
Seen together, these relationships turn institutional memory into an active resource. Each leader receives more than a title: she inherits examples of how to listen, whom to invite and when to change course. The value lies not in copying a predecessor’s style, but in making stewardship easier for whoever follows.
The Doors Still Closed
Yet a long record of women leading one chapter does not mean the wider industry has solved representation. Panousopoulos notes that women form a substantial share of design graduates and practitioners without holding a matching share of senior roles. Women of colour encounter additional, overlapping barriers. Pay, titles and promotion remain visible measures of inequality, while informal expectations can be harder to identify and challenge.
Goldwell makes another absence visible by speaking openly about motherhood alongside creative direction. She did not grow up professionally watching senior creative women navigate pregnancy, maternity leave, pumping at work or the collision between leadership and caring for sick children. By sharing those realities with her team, she treats them as ordinary parts of working life rather than private complications that leaders must conceal.
Dubon-Aguilar identifies a similarly quiet mechanism in recruitment: opportunity often goes only to candidates who have already been given the same opportunity. Prospective board members are asked for previous board experience, allowing a closed circle to reproduce itself without declaring any exclusionary rule. AIGA NY’s response matters because doing nothing is not neutral; without deliberate intervention, familiar patterns simply continue.
That pattern explains why representation at entry level is not enough. If access narrows with every step upward, a diverse intake can still produce a homogeneous leadership tier. Change therefore depends on examining the rules around advancement, not merely celebrating who was welcomed at the beginning.
What Future Leaders Need
Permission matters as much as technique when people have been taught to wait for proof that they belong. Panousopoulos advises emerging leaders not to postpone responsibility until they feel completely prepared. Readiness keeps moving, and leadership is supposed to stretch the person accepting it. Waiting for all uncertainty to disappear can become another gate that never opens.
Williams argues that a portfolio alone is not enough. Moving into leadership requires a point of view: the ability to explain not only what was made, but why it matters and whom it serves. Craft establishes capability; perspective helps other people understand where that capability can take a team, organisation or community.
Dubon-Aguilar adds reciprocity to that picture. Honest conversations about salaries, career routes and available opportunities helped her grow because other people were willing to make normally hidden information visible. Her principle is to accept that generosity, then return it to the collective so access does not end with one person’s advancement.
After more than four decades, AIGA NY is not simply an archive of women’s achievements. It remains evidence that creative leadership can be durable without being domineering, ambitious without erasing care, and credible without rewarding only the loudest voice. Its strongest legacy is not a finished model, but a continuing practice: widen the doorway, share what power teaches you, and leave behind structures that help more people lead.
