PROFILE - Leimei Julia Chiu
Leimei Julia Chiu
Director, International Design Center,
NAGOYA Inc. and
Executive Board Member,
ICSID & Vice President, ICOGRADA
Leimei Julia Chiu has spent most of her adult life working to help designers and students of design promote their work across national and cultural barriers. To this end, she has striven to help them achieve true crosscultural experiences that will add to their lives and enrich their output as professionals.
Leimei serves as Director of Global Communications for the International Design Center NAGOYA (IdcN). IdcN is a multidisciplinary joint venture between the Japanese government and a consortium of 100 corporations. It is one of the largest institutes in the world devoted to the promotion of design. In her capacity there, Leimei has instigated and acted as creative director for over 160 design promotion projects and collaborated with 81 design centers and over 310 universities around the world. Her goal has always been to promote and inspire designers as individuals. This determination has led her to conceive of unique and challenging projects suited to the participants and their work.
In her design promotion projects (exhibitions, workshops, international competitions, R&D, publishing, international forums and world design congresses), carried out in both private and public sectors, Leimei has worked with major Japanese corporations as well as with governments and academic institutions inover 38 countries across Europe, North America, and the Pan Pacific Rim. In addition, she has lectured at design conferences and academic institutions in over 24 countries and served on numerous competition juries, including Red Dot Design Concept Award, Brno Biennial, Design for Asia Award, World Design Leadership Award, BIO (Bienale of Industrial Design); and currently serves on the Jury of the Good Design Award, Japan's only overall system for evaluating and promoting design. A recipient of the Icograda President's Award in 2003, Leimei was awarded the Mainichi Design Special Prize (along with the managing team of the Visualogue Congress).
