Born in 1951 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Mary Ann immigrated to Canada in 1970. Her education and career drew widely from many sources of inspiration, finally coming to focus on the practice and pedagogy of graphic design.
Before turning to teaching, she co-founded Maruska Studios in Ottawa, and for ten years designed and art-directed communications pieces focused on the arts, education, health, and the environment for clients including the National Gallery, Ottawa University, the Red Cross, and Environment Canada. Moving with the times from fax machine to early Macintosh — with its dreaded bomb warning! — the studio grew to a staff of eleven and was celebrated by Applied Arts magazine as one of Ottawa’s “Hot Shops.”
Becoming a member of the Ottawa Chapter in the early 80s was a boon to her professional development, as her university studies had been in psychology, not design, and she was largely learning on the job. New to town, she was happy to be accepted into the young Ottawa Chapter where she would meet and be mentored by design professionals, Judith Gregory and Eiko Emori among them. She got a taste of the national character of the organization from the monthly newsletter produced by then National President Gregory Silver and his partner Denise Saulnier. Enjoying the wit and wisdom the newsletter offered, she was hooked.
Mary Ann went on to serve in every executive role at both the Chapter and National levels, apart from treasurer, and including National Council President. Yet for her, the national scope provided by the GDC was always rooted in personal connections. For example, as Ottawa Chapter President she challenged David Berman to take on the creation of a code of ethics for the society, a torch he has carried through the GDC and RGD for decades. And she fondly remembers introducing a nervous young Robert Smith to design guru Neville Smith — a spark which grew into a long-term friendship.
During her eight years on the National Council, she undertook several ambitious initiatives. While VP Communications under visionary National President Paul Brunelle, she worked with co-editor Ulrich Wodicka to launch the Graphic Design Journal. They created four issues, with design and production assistance for issues #2 and 3 from Tiit Telmet, before handing the project on to Rob Peters. As National President, she shepherded the launch of the National Secretariat at Ottawa’s Arts Court, where it is still located, and saw it staffed with the exceptional Sheryl MacDonald. A major undertaking of the new secretariat was the centralization of annual dues collection, deftly facilitated by Treasurer Catherine Garden. As National Past-president in 1996, Mary Ann coordinated with Paul Haslip and Tiit Telmet to produce the GDC 40th anniversary book gdc@forty. For several years she served as representative for the GDC with the National Design Alliance, a body uniting the various Canadian design disciplines — graphic, industrial, interior, architectural, and landscape. In that role, Mary Ann served as chair of the publication working group for the design sector study by Price Waterhouse, Shaping Canada’s Future by Design, published in 1997 by Human Resource Development Canada.
Her teaching career began in 1989 at Algonquin College, Ottawa. Discovering that she enjoyed interacting with the students, and following some good advice received while at the 1991 Icograda Design Congress in Montreal (where she conducted creative workshops), she pursued a Master of Arts in Advertising Design from Syracuse University. Upon graduation in 1994, while National Council President, she began a 20-year career at Sheridan College, where she taught design basics and developed courses in design thinking and the creative process. Her career-long quest for the magic and mechanics of graphic wit had been sparked in a talk given by Hanno Ehses at a conference, Design at the Odeon, convened by the Ottawa Chapter ca. 1985, in which he explored the use of rhetorical devices in literature and visual expression. Her master’s thesis, Stimulating Professional Creativity in Visual Communication, was to become the backbone of the course Design Thinking: Creative and Critical Pathways and included visual rhetoric as an approach for achieving fresh ideas. She participated in joining the Sheridan design program with that of York University to become the first degree-granting design program in Ontario and Design Thinking was her favourite course to teach. She retired from college teaching in 2015.
Ever the enthusiastic student herself, Mary Ann obtained her B.A. from York University in 1974 and her MA from Syracuse twenty years later. In 2008 she graduated from Wisdom University in California with a Doctor of Ministry degree. That unique course of study sought to integrate the wisdom of western spirituality and global indigenous cultures with the emerging scientific understanding of the universe and the passionate creativity of art. Her thesis was the design of a course entitled Archetypes in Science, Nature, and Design which she brought to more than 250 Sheridan students.
She currently lives with design historian Brian Donnelly in the charming town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands, not far from their family cottage on Charleston Lake. She continues her penchant for volunteering, now with the newly formed Gananoque Arts Network where she has been working on exhibitions and programming.
2024 marks the 30th anniversary of her taking on the position of President of the GDC National Council.