senior, multidisciplinary design leader
Design, research, pedagogy, and film in integrated practice
Gigi Polo is a senior, multidisciplinary design leader, educator, and founder of Gigi Polo Lab. She served as Design Director at Dauphin Americas, leading Design Services and Marketing to reposition the brand around sustainability, workplace wellbeing, social responsibility, and integrated design strategy. She also led the development of brand identity and marketing positioning for NuWud, translating material innovation into cohesive, high-impact messaging.
Today, at Gigi Polo Lab, she directs design strategy and creative vision for mission-driven organizations, creating high-performance environments and brand systems that integrate spatial experience, material innovation, and user wellbeing.
She has over two decades of teaching experience at Parsons School of Design and also teaches at Chavón School of Design in the Dominican Republic. She has developed original teaching frameworks, including the Sprint-to-Pacing model for intensive learning, authored Second Language Through Design[ing], and produced the documentary Madly Gifted, exploring the relationship between bipolar disorder and artistic temperament.
Gigi is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at RMIT University, where her research investigates neurodivergence, embodied cognition, and spatial design through immersive, multisensory environments. Her work explores how passive architecture, biophilic and somatic design, material systems, neuroaesthetics, and sensory strategies can support cognitive diversity, human performance, and innovative models for learning across multi-modal instruction, interior environments, and built spaces.
