The graphic designer and typographer Stefan Sagmeister usually channels his creative output through the firm Sagmeister & Walsh. Born in Austria and based in New York since the early 1990s, Sagmeister has produced unorthodox, provocative designs for album covers, posters, and books that upend the status quo and take his discipline in new directions. He won two Grammys for a Talking Heads box set (2004) and a David Byrne/Brian Eno album (2009) and received the 2013 AIGA Medal. 

In Rome, Sagmeister plans to explore beauty, “a subject very close to my heart and one that we have been working on extensively over the past years.” He and his design partner Jessica Walsh organized a critically acclaimed and well-attended exhibition called Beauty at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Vienna in 2018; the show will travel in updated forms for several years. “One of the questions I will explore in Rome,” Sagmeister said, “is how ‘beauty’ changes the way we feel and the way we behave.”