Maurice Meilleur

Instructor, Continuing Education

Maurice Meilleur is a recovering political theorist turned graphic designer and design researcher and writer. He completed a PhD in political theory from Indiana University Bloomington in 2004, and earned his MFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. He’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he teaches and studies typography and generative design, as well as design methods and semiotics. Maurice has contributed numerous type and book reviews to Typographica and Fonts in Use, and he’s writing a book on the principles and history of constructed scripts. His experimental modular typeface Kast was a jury finalist in the Society of Typographic Aficionados’s 2016 protoType competition. He’s developed Kast into paper, photographic, print, and digital artifacts, and he explores digital animation using Python and Drawbot as part of a larger investigation into typographic representation and algorithmically-defined formal systems. 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.