Judith Dupré is a writer, structural historian, and public speaker. She is the New York Times bestselling author of several works of narrative nonfiction on art, design, and architecture. She has been described as “a scholar with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style.”
Life and career
Dupré was born in Providence, Rhode Island into a family of architectural preservationists. She earned a M.Div. from Yale Divinity School in 2011. She is a fellow of at Yale University and a Dominique de Menil scholar at the , also at Yale. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1978 and did postgraduate work at Hunter College and the , both in New York City. Dupré serves on the editorial board of , a journal of the American Institute of Architects' . She has curated and consulted on numerous contemporary art exhibitions, including an installation of temporary refugee housing on Sterling Quad at Yale Divinity School in 2007. From 1979 through 1990, she curated the Harry N. Abrams Art Collection, an important collection of Pop Art assembled by the art book publisherHarry Abrams.
Publications
Her books have been translated into fourteen languages. Their unusual shapes and bindings echo their subject matter, and honor the tradition and material presence of the illuminated book. Skyscrapers is 18” high. Bridges is a yard-wide when open, to accommodate its panoramic photos of the longest structures. The cover of Churches is split down the center so that it opens like the doors of a cathedral. The cover of Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory is a replica, in raised relief, of ancient stones; its title lettering was drawn for the book by Nicholas Benson. Page designs include deep-captioned photographs, floating quotations, timelines, and sidebar explorations. The page layouts suggest a kinetic reading experience beyond the turning of successive pages, and have been designed to create individualized reading experiences, where the reader chooses how to engage the array of images, essays and marginal commentaries. She is the author of the 2016 book titled One World Trade Center: Biography of the Building and official biographer of One World Trade Center and. Dupré is the only author given unfettered access to the Trade Center site, team, and archives by The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. She presents the story of the new World Trade Center in its entirety: from Mayor Rudy Giuliani's vow to rebuild on September 12, 2001, through the complex, often contentious interactions between multiple public and private agencies with a stake in the project, to the placing of One World Trade Center’s spire in 2013. The book incorporates over seventy interviews with major participants, including architects David M. Childs, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, and Michael Arad.
