Robert J. Thompson

RJ Thompson, MFA is an award-winning marketing and graphic design professional. Currently, he is a Teaching Associate Professor of Digital Narrative and Interactive Design at the University of Pittsburgh. He was most recently the Manager of Digital Strategy in Pitt Health Sciences. He previously served as Director of Digital Marketing in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh.

Before joining Pitt, he was a tenured Assistant Professor of Graphic + Interactive Design in the Department of Art at Youngstown State University. Before Youngstown State, Thompson taught at Carnegie Mellon University, La Roche University, and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Continuing his career in education, he has been an Adjunct Professor of Graphic & Interactive Design at Point Park University since 2019 where he was responsible for writing and teaching the interactive design curriculum. In 2020, he began teaching at the Community College of Allegheny County.

Outside of marketing, design, and teaching, he is also the Co-Principal and Creative Strategist for +Public, a Pennsylvania-based social enterprise that focuses on cultivating community and economic development impact through the creation of branded communication platforms, creative place-making, and storytelling initiatives for communities-in-revival.

Throughout his career, Thompson has received many accolades for his creative works: In 2015, he was one of several recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant, valued at $100,000, for the INPLACE (“Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts & Community Engagement”) project. In 2017, Thompson received a “Best of Marketing Award” from the Ohio Economic Development Association for his efforts in rebranding the City of Youngstown, Ohio. In 2018, he was accepted into the prestigious Cohort 2 of the National Arts Marketing Project, a program supported by Americans for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2019, he also received a scholarship to join the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy through the School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, he was honored with the Ohio Governors Award in the Arts in Community Development, the state of Ohio’s highest recognition in the arts sector.

Thompson is President-Emeritus of AMA Pittsburgh and current President of AIGA Pittsburgh.

Meet RJ

Chapters:  
0:00 Introduction  
0:27 Why do you teach in the program?  
2:14 How do you bring the real world into your online classes?  
5:39 How do you engage with students?  
7:18 Fun (surprise) question