Grace Hawthorne

Grace Hawthorne is an entrepreneur, artist, author and educator. She is the Founder/CEO of Paper Punk, an award-winning Origami meets LEGO mashup that helps people exercise their creativity and Foldmade, an innovative work supply system that helps people get stuff done. As an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University's design institute (aka: the d.school), she has taught courses on creativity/innovation/failure for over fifteen years and spearheaded a groundbreaking research project on creative capacity building published in Science and covered by Wired magazine. Previously, she founded ReadyMade, the culturally disruptive design magazine that ignited the maker movement, and led its acquisition by Meredith Corporation (NASDAQ: MDP) and co-authored the critically acclaimed book on reuse design, ReadyMade: How to Make (Almost) Everything (Random House/Potter). Her products can be found on the shelves of mass retailers and her artwork has been exhibited in several national museums including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Triennial. She holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, MFA from UCLA’s School of Film and Television, and a BA in Visual Communication from UC Berkeley. Grace has dedicated her life to making things and experiences that cultivate human creativity through the marriage of art + commerce. She believes that (almost) anything is possible.