Kelli Anderson

Kelli Anderson uses design magic to connect people with the depth and possibility of their worlds. She created This Book Is a Camera (2015)—which transforms into a working camera—and This Book Is a Planetarium (2017)—which houses a paper planetarium. Her Alphabet in Motion, an experimental telling of typographic history, was released to great acclaim in 2025. Anderson is a two-time National Design Award nominee, and her design clients include NPR, The New Yorker, the Guggenheim, MoMA, Apple, and The New York Times. 

Anderson’s medallion investigates the fact that Thomas Jefferson felt that he possessed the agency to philosophize about freedom, but that only time had the agency of changing the system of slavery. As he said in a letter written in 1826, near the end of his life, “Time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.” Her image takes inspiration from a pine sample, taken from Monticello, as an object of dendrochronology study, and points out that time is both a natural and a human construct—that we do have the agency to change time itself.