A designer, professor and academic leader, President Rosanne Somerson has been committed to furthering RISD’s mission since she was a student here in the 1970s. She returned to RISD in the 1980s to teach and in 1995 founded the Furniture Design department. As president she frequently speaks and writes about the power of critical thinking and making, underscoring the value of art, design and a deeply immersive studio-based education to advancing life in the 21st century.
When she first arrived at RISD as a freshman in 1972, Rosanne Somerson 76 ID didn’t anticipate that it was the beginning of a lifelong connection to the college and its community. She had originally planned to study photography, but once she took an elective woodworking course her focus changed. “I found it to be incredibly exciting—and the hardest thing I had ever done,” she remembers. “I was challenged as I never had been before, but working in three dimensions was simpatico with my needs as an artist.”
Working closely with renowned woodworker, teacher and mentor Tage Frid and other faculty luminaries, Somerson soaked in everything she could about process, design, technique and aesthetics. She earned her BFA in Industrial Design (ID) in 1976, focusing on furniture within the ID department two decades before RISD had a freestanding Furniture Design department.
In 1978 Somerson established her own studio to focus on designing and making furniture full time. But when Frid invited her to take over for him in 1985, she readily accepted and went on to run the graduate furniture program in ID for 10 years before helping to conceive of and found the Furniture Design department. In 1995 she assumed the top leadership role in the new department, overseeing both the BFA and MFA programs and helping to establish its solid reputation for educating exciting new innovators in the field.
Somerson served as Furniture Design department head from 1995–2011, with a brief hiatus to step in as interim associate provost from 2005–07. In 2011 she was invited to become interim provost and the following year earned the provost’s position after emerging as the top candidate in an international search.
RISD’s Board of Trustees appointed Somerson RISD’s 17th president on February 18, 2015 after conducting a comprehensive international search during which she served as interim president from January 1, 2014 until her permanent appointment.