Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati
Reneé is an Associate Professor, endowed Professor and Program Coordinator of the Communication Design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is a graduate of the Graphic Design program at the University of Cincinnati in 2002 and received her Master’s from North Carolina State in 2008.
Reneé has been teaching typography, exhibition design, and graphic design in the Communication Design program for the last 14 years. Her students have won countless awards from Graphics, Graphic Design USA, and Creative Communication Awards Design competitions over the years.
Her research focuses on developing digital and physical tools that seek to address our society’s literacy problem. Currently, she has a company that sells her reading tool called See Words Reading®. René came up with See Words because of a friend’s child who attributed his reading struggle to the letters’ layout on a page. Reneé, as a designer, felt that she could help with the problem.
Reneé is a Cincy Innovates winner and has been acknowledged as a Rising Tech star by ComSpark, awarded by the Business Courier “Best Software of the Year” and awarded as the University of Cincinnati Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year. Reneé and her start-up company were featured in Forbes for their work in helping everyone learn to read. Recently, a font her team has designed called SeeType won an STA award, and she has given a TEDx talk on Eradication Literacy Through the Power of a Font. Additionally, she is working in a collaborative research team that was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to develop a tool to help correct speech problems in children.
From Design Student to Design Researcher and Entrepreneur
Reneé will share her journey from graphic design student to design researcher and entrepreneur. She began her journey not being accepted into design school to graduating Summa Cum Laude and second in her graduating class to doing professional design work for companies like Nickelodeon, Target, and Bath & Body Works. She faced many successes and challenges along the way, which led her to pivot to graduate school, seeking to get into a form of design that allowed for more service and social impact. Developing collaborations with educators, educational psychologists, and computer scientists, Renee and her team are creating educational tools that help create the skill and will to read, one person at a time.
