President Schupbach

Jason Schupbach is the president of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). He is a nationally recognized expert on support systems for creatives and the nexus of creativity and comprehensive community development.

Preceding his position at FIT, Schupbach was the dean of the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel University. He is a nationally recognized expert on support systems for creatives and on the nexus of creativity and comprehensive community development. 

At Drexel, Schupbach led the college to success in fundraising, rankings, scholarly output, enrollment, and faculty, staff, and student support. He launched a groundbreaking new apprenticeship model of education with URBN and was the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning, published in 2025. Before joining Drexel, Schupbach was the director of The Design School at Arizona State University (ASU), where he led the ambitious ReDesign.School initiative to reinvent design education for the 21st century and was a key advisor to ASU on diverse projects, such as the Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable Communities; James Turrell’s large-scale land artwork, Roden Crater; and ASU’s downtown Los Angeles campus.

Prior to ASU, he was director of Design and Creative Placemaking programs for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), where he oversaw all design- and creative-placemaking grantmaking and partnerships, including Our Town and Design Art Works grants, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design, and the NEA’s federal agency collaborations. In addition, he oversaw "Creativity Connects," the first report in a decade on the major trends and conditions affecting U.S. artists and designers, and a new grant program to support partnership projects between creatives and other fields of practice.

Earlier, Schupbach served then-Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts from 2008 to 2010 as the Creative Economy director, tasked with supporting creative and tech businesses in the state. He formerly was the director of ArtistLink, a Ford Foundation-funded initiative to support creatives and to stabilize and revitalize communities through the creation of affordable space and innovative environments for creatives. He has also worked for the mayor of Chicago and New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. He has written extensively on supporting creatives and the role of art and design in uplifting communities. His writing has been featured as an Aspen Institute "Best Idea of the Day."

Schupbach earned a Master in City Planning degree and a graduate-level urban design certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997.