Chris Cantwell is the principal and owner of Industrial Design Studio, a consultancy design practice, based in Portland. In 1991, she began writing about curvilinear geometries and visual correspondences of automotive and bridge design in her essay Five Meditations on Bridges and Automobiles. She joined the Advocacy Committee of PSA after attending a Maine Department of Transportation public hearing on the Veterans’ Memorial Bridge Replacement project. Ever hopeful that infrastructure will be beautiful built structures of architecture and engineering, she decided to get involved in the public process.

Having pursued dual career paths as designer and color consultant, design critic and lecturer, Cantwell has been a faculty member teaching graduate and undergraduate studios, seminars and lecture courses in industrial design, interiors and architecture at Harvard University, The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, and Maine College of Art among others. She has been a frequent visitor, critic and lecturer at SCI-Arc, Parsons the New School for Design, Pratt Institute, College of Architecture Texas A & M University, MIT Department of Architecture, The Harvard Business School and the Bauhaus – Universitat Weimar.

In 2010, Cantwell received recognition for her design collaboration in the Maine AIA Honor Award winning House on Casco Bay, Elliott Elliott and Norelius Architects, and the AIA New England Special Mention Award for Excellence in 2009. Her industrial and corporate interiors span decades. Recently, she was an editorial reader for Toward a New Interior an Anthology of Interior Design Theory soon to be released by the Princeton Architectural Press (2011), and is a contributor to the Handbook of Interior Design, Berg Publishers (2012).

Cantwell received the Bachelor of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and the Master in Design Studies in History, Theory and Criticism from The Harvard University Graduate School of Design.