Istituto Europeo di Design (IED)

Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) is a private international network of art and design schools founded in Milan in 1966 by Francesco Morelli, who was then twenty-four and wanted to build a new kind of school for the creative professions. From its Milanese base the institute expanded across Italy - Rome in 1973, Cagliari in 1984, Turin in 1989 - then into Spain with Madrid in 1994 and Barcelona in 2002, and later to Brazil with Sao Paulo in 2005 and Rio de Janeiro in 2014, adding the Aldo Galli Academy of Fine Arts in Como and, in 2020, the Kunsthal in Bilbao. It now describes itself as the largest European network of art and design schools, with eleven campuses in three countries plus a New York presence, around 10,000 students a year, more than 200,000 alumni and over 3,000 lecturers. Teaching is grouped into fields such as fashion, accessories and jewellery; interior, product and mobility design; visual communication, graphic and interactive media; film, video and sound; fine arts and curation; illustration, animation and game design; photography and visual narratives; and strategy, marketing and communication, delivered through more than 100 undergraduate and 300 postgraduate courses. Ownership passed to the Francesco Morelli Foundation after the founder's death in 2017, and IED became a Benefit Corporation in 2022.