Elle Kim
Elle Kim is a creative director and design leader who brings compelling brand stories to life across diverse media platforms. With a passion for storytelling, she creates brand expressions and experiences that connect with audiences and deliver meaningful business results. She has built and mentored creative teams, redefining the designer's role as a catalyst for change by encouraging new perspectives and demonstrating how thoughtful design leadership can drive both creative excellence and business growth.

Most recently, she served as Director of Design at the Museum of Modern Art, leading a dynamic design team and overseeing large-scale, mission-driven projects. In this role, she guided strategic direction and design development to expand and engage audiences across multiple touchpoints—from brand identity and exhibitions to in-gallery experiences, wayfinding, education, events, and advertising.

Currently, she is exploring new creative approaches and working methodologies across different mediums.

Linkedin
Select projects2004-2022
elle.je.kim@gmail.com
MoMA 
— Brand design system
 In October 2019, MoMA reopened to the public with newly expanded spaces and unprecedented ways to show our collections. Building on our 90 year history, MoMA Design studio created a new adaptable design system of modular layers to embody the energy and dynamism of our expansion. 

In collaboration with:
MoMA In-house Design team (under the direction of Rob Giampietro, then Director of Design), Commercial Type, Order, and PepRally
MoMA 
— Education design system For over 80 years, MoMA has championed an experimental, research-driven approach to museum education, aiming to foster engagement with art across all ages and abilities. Anchored by our founding director Alfred Barr's vision of MoMA as a "laboratory," we developed a scalable education design system that expresses the experimental, playful, and inviting nature of our programs. Adhering to a core framework of fonts, sizes, grids, and colors, the system allows flexibility to present information concisely and accessibly while catering to diverse audiences, including children, teenagers, seniors, and those with special needs. 

In collaboration with:
MoMA In-house Design team (under the direction of Rob Giampietro, then Director of Design)


MoMA 
— Wayfinding design system To enhance the experience for our 3 million annual visitors navigating an additional 40,000 sq ft, our design team reimagined the entire visitor journey, which included refining touchpoints such as the visitor guide and integrating digital and architectural wayfinding systems for seamless navigation of the complex space.

In collaboration with:
Gensler NY (wayfinding strategy, design, and production), 
MoMA Digital Media (digital wayfinding)



MoMA Exhibition
— Items: Is Fashion Modern? Items: Is Fashion Modern? is an investigation of 111 garments and accessories that have had a profound impact on our lives in 20th and 21st centuries. Driven by objects, not designers, the exhibition focuses on the many relationships between fashion and functionality, culture, aesthetics, politics, religion, labor, identity, economy, and technology.

Curators: Paola Antonelli, Michelle Millar Fisher
Designer: Elle Kim, Kevin Ballon






MoMA Exhibition 
— Automania Automania is an in-depth look at an object that has been at the center of innovation, social transformation, planet’s ecosystem, and critical debate among designers and artists. 

As a throughline from the exhibition to marketing campaigns and retail posters, we took the conflicting feelings to car culture in the 20th century, such as compulsion, fixation, desire, and rage and juxtaposed with evocative imagery of the iconic objects to convey a wide range of emotions and key themes that underpin the exhibition.  

Curators: Juliet Kinchin, Andrew Gardner, Paul Galloway
Designers: Derek Flynn, Damien Saatdjian, Kevin Ballon
Motion designer: Fionn Breen






MoMA Exhibition 
— Robert Heinecken: Object Matter Coming from the vibrant art scene of 1960s Los Angeles, Robert Heinecken called himself a “parra-photographer” and experimented with different mediums and limitless photographic processes to push the boundaries of traditional photography. Drawing on the countless pictures in magazines, books, pornography, television, and even consumer items such as TV dinners, he uses found images to explores how mass media shapes our daily lives, especially concerning gender, sex, and violence. 
 
Curators: Eva Respini, Drew Sawyer
Designer: Elle Kim


MoMA Exhibition 
— The Original Emoji by Shigetaka Kurita To announce the acquisition of the NTT DOCOMO’s original set of 176 emoji to the MoMA collection, we celebrated these humble masterpieces of design with our visitors through telling a story of its critical impact in the growth of a new visual language. The integration included displaying all 176 emoji on a wall with digital screens sharing their history and influence on mobile communication. Additionally, we crafted playful text messages translated into 9 languages to welcome international visitors.

Curators: Juliet Kinchin, Paul Galloway
Designer: Elle Kim, Kevin Ballon
Motion designer: Paul Danhauser