Amy Whitaker

Amy Whitaker has an MBA from Yale and an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London. Her undergraduate degree is from Williams College in studio art and political science. She has worked at the Guggenheim, MoMA and the Tate, and for the artist Jenny Holzer and for D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P., one of the largest investment management firms in the world.

Her first book, Museum Legs, was published in 2009, and her work has appeared in previously in the British journal Architectural Design and in the New York Times. Since 2004, she has taught economic and financial theory to artists in a course she designed called Business School for Artists. The recent class at Trade School, an artist-run, barter-economy school, was featured in the New York Times City Room blog. A version of the course at Williams College, called Entrepreneurship as an Art Form, led to a third of the students starting companies.

In the fall of 2010, she is an adjunct professor teaching managerial economics in a design MBA program. In the winter and spring of 2011, she will be teaching economics as a fine art studio course at the Rhode Island School of Design. She also currently works for the business information start-up, Locus Analytics (a part of the Data Grids group), and as a consultant on a new William Eggleston Museum being founded in Memphis, the photographer's hometown.

Amy has spoken widely on the intersection of creativity, business, and public life, including in the Authors@Google program, IBM, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Warhol Museum. In September 2010, she will be the keynote speaker to all incoming students at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Originally from the South, she currently lives in New York.