Stephen Burks is an industrial designer and partner at Stephen Burks Man Made, where he works to unite art, community, and industry through a hands-on, workshop-based approach. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in more than 10 countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary design. Stephen Burks Man Made has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop a more pluralistic vision of design including BD Barcelona, Cappellini, Dedon, MASS Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois.

Burks has had solo exhibitions and led curatorial projects at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Stephen Burks Man Made, 2011), the Museum of Arts and Design (Stephen Burks, Are You a Hybrid, 2011), and the High Museum of Art (Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, 2022). He has been visiting faculty and a strategic consultant to academic institutions worldwide and has taught architecture and design at Berea College, Columbia University GSAPP, ECAL, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Burks received a bachelor’s from the Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus) at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a master’s from Columbia University GSAPP. He is the first African American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the first industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.