Sandrine Lebas, creative director at the San Francisco firm LUNAR, has been appointed chair of the Industrial Design Program at California College of the Arts (CCA). The undergraduate program is one of the largest programs at the college with approximately 155 students.

Lebas was selected after an intensive international search. Previous chairs of the program have included fuseproject founder Yves Béhar and design scholar and CCA Distinguished Professor Steven Holt.

Lebas commented, “Drawing from 15 years of core industrial design experience in the Bay Area and Europe, I am thrilled to become a key contributor of the CCA design community. The craft assets of the college resonate with my design beliefs of thinking and making, allowing students to develop their own design voice through experimentation and creative intuition.”

About Sandrine Lebas

A native of France, Lebas graduated with honors from ENSCI-les Ateliers. She remained in Paris for several years working for Philippe Starck on the 7-Eleven Japan stationery line, GoodGoods catalog, and Alessi homeware.

In 1998 she started her own design consultancy, Design à la Montagne, collaborating with such companies as Salomon, Alcatel, Thomson Multimédia, and L’Oréal.

Lebas joined LUNAR in 2000, participating in and leading projects for a number of clients, including Hewlett Packard, Adidas, LeapFrog, Accuray, Bodymedia, and Ventus. Her work encompasses medical apparel and diagnostic instruments, children’s entertainment, and home furnishings.

Awards & Honors

She is the recipient many awards and honors, including the iF Product Design Award for KOO, a transformable baby bassinet. She received much recognition for the Ventus Provent Sleep Apnea Therapy, including the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award, the Medical Device Excellence Award, and the IDEA Gold award in 2010.

Read more about Sandrine Lebas.

About California College of the Arts

Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is noted for the interdisciplinarity and breadth of its programs. It offers studies in 21 undergraduate and eight graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, master of fine arts, and master of business administration degrees.

With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, CCA currently enrolls 1,950 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl.