John Bielenberg is a designer, entrepreneur, and imaginative advocate for a better world. He is the founder of Project M and co-founder of FUTURE and COMMON.
In 2009, John was awarded the Washington University Skandalaris Award for Design Entrepreneurship and went on to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art. He was also awarded the 2011 NASAD Citation for outstanding work and overall impact in the fields of art and design, as an author, educator, social activist, and designer. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York and California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
In 2003, John created Project M, an immersive program designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers, and filmmakers by proving that their work—especially their wrongest thinking—can have significant impact on communities. Project M has developed projects in Alabama, Baltimore, Connecticut, Costa Rica, Detroit, Germany, Ghana, Iceland, Kansas, Maine, Minneapolis, New Orleans and Oklahoma.
John collaborated with Alex and Ana Bogusky and Rob Schuham in 2010 to form COMMON, and most recently John has partnered with long-time collaborator Greg Galle to launch a new firm called FUTURE that helps
organizations unlock ingenuity to solve their greatest challenges.