Tod Lippy

Tod Lippy (born 1963 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American artist, designer, writer, editor and musician. Lippy received an M.A. the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 1988, and an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University in 1990. He joined the editorial staff at Print magazine in 1991, eventually becoming the magazine's senior editor. Lippy co-founded and edited Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art (1994–97) and the arts zine publicsfear (1992–94). His 2000 book, Projections 11: New York Film-Makers on Film-Making, was published by Faber & Faber. In 2003, he established the Esopus Foundation Ltd., a 501(c)(3) arts organization.

In the summer of 2003, Lippy founded Esopus, the main program of the Esopus Foundation, which was declared “a thing of lavish, eccentric beauty, less flipped through than stared at,” by The New York Times’s David Carr in 2004.. Lippy was the publication's editor, designer, publisher, and sole full-time employee until it suspended publication in 2018 after 25 issues. Esopus has been the subject of dedicated exhibitions at de Appel Art Center in Amsterdam (2016) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2017), and Lippy's particular approach to the presentation of creative work in an unmediated format has been featured in numerous print and digital features as well as interviews on National Public Radio stations such as KCRW and WNYC. Lippy's design work for Esopus has been featured in a number of books—including the Graphis Design Annual, Print Design Annual, Essentials of Visual Communication (Laurence King, 2008), and Art Direction + Editorial Design (Abrams, 2007)—and in exhibitions at venues including the Walker Art Center, Rome’s Contemporary Art Museum, and the Casino Luxembourg. Lippy has been invited to participate in a number of panel discussions related to small-press and nonprofit publishing, including the 2009 conference of the American Library Association's Rare Books and Manuscripts Section at the University of Virginia in 2009 and the AIGA "Fresh Dialogue" speakers' series in 2007

From 1998 to 2002, Lippy was an adjunct faculty member at the School of Visual Arts M.F.A. Design program, where he developed the graduate seminar “The Magazine Workshop.” He has since lectured at educational and cultural institutions including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, MTV Networks, Aesop, Bennington College, Rice University, New York University, USC's Roski School of Fine Arts, and Yale University. He has been interviewed for a number of journals, radio programs, and books, including Becoming a Graphic Designer (Wiley, 2005); Fresh Dialogue: Making Magazines (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007); and the NPR program From Scratch.

From 2009 to 2012, Lippy served as curator and director of Esopus Space, an alternative exhibition and performance venue in New York City, where he mounted 18 exhibitions and staged 30 events. Lippy also curated the exhibitions “Mark Hogancamp” (2006) and “Don Bachardy: One-Day Stands” (2008; jointly organized with Matthew Higgs) at White Columns in Manhattan; and “Mark Hogancamp: Women of Marwencol” (2014; co-curated with Janet Hicks) and “Golden Years: Photographs by Ed Rosenbaum” (2016) at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. In 2018, Lippy launched the event series "In Process," for which he interviewed creative people from a range of disciplines about the process behind their work. His subjects included photographer Tina Barney, designer Fernando Santangelo, MoMA archivist Michelle Elligott, film producer Alan Elliott, and podcaster/journalist Leon Neyfakh. Lippy's 2000 short narrative film Cookies was shown in 20 film festivals in the U.S. and abroad.

In August 2019, Lippy announced the impending release of his first album, Here We Are. The lead single from the album, "Good Start," was selected by LA radio station KCRW to be its "Today's Top Tune" on Monday, September 2, 2019. Lippy produced the 10-song album with Kramer, who also mixed and mastered it in the summer of 2019.

In August 2018, Lippy was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, during which he completed a series of drawings related to Esopus that were published in the book Esopus Drawings in the fall of 2018.[1] He was the recipient of Specific Object's "Object of the Year" award (for Esopus) in 2007 and was given an Acker Award in 2018 for his contributions to the downtown NYC avant-garde community.