Claudia Strong is a professor, curator, designer and writer who believes in the power of communication to connect one human being to another. Now in her 18th year on faculty at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in New York, she has dedicated this most recent phase of her career to nurturing and supporting the next generation of designers, photographers and filmmakers, teaching courses in writing and design to graduates and undergraduates. She also helps lead workshops, designs exhibits, and contributes to the global photographic community via The Alexia as its curator of communications and design. In 2023, she served as a visiting scholar with The VII Foundation in Sarajevo.
Claudia, who emigrated to the United States from Chile, first became intrigued by the power of visuals to tell important stories while working as a copy editor at a major newspaper, but she eventually left to pursue a wider range of projects, including commercial work, book design, web design, picture editing and, ultimately, teaching and curation. At Newhouse, where she was honored with the inaugural Excellence in Teaching award, Claudia is known as a tough but caring professor who pushes students beyond what even they think they’re capable of to transform them into the unique communicators only they can be. Her recent foray into curation has led to producing exhibits for the EU Parliament, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Goethe Institute, private international galleries and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China.