Karen Korellis Reuther

Author of MAN-MADE: How we designed a world that leaves women out, and how we can make it right | Design Lecturer Harvard Graduate School of Design | 2022 Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow at Harvard | Former Creative Executive NIKE & Reebok.

Karen Korellis Reuther has been a designer by training and practice for over forty years, and today is a practicing activist committed to inclusion by design and ending gender bias in product design. She left the Reebok C-suite in 2020 to pursue a Fellowship at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI), and is currently a Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Karen teaches in the Master’s of Design Engineering program and founded the Inclusion by Design event series, hosted by the Harvard Grid. These events bring together students, faculty and practitioners who share her passion for designing a world that is safe, hospitable and inclusive for women. Karen is a sought after guest lecturer and public speaker across Harvard and the world.

Prior to her academic career, Karen was a creative, product and brand strategy executive in the sports footwear and apparel industry, with experience in fashion, lifestyle, consumer products and electronics. As Vice President of Creative Direction and Innovation at Reebok, she led the global creative strategy and implementation across every consumer touch point of the brand. Karen was also Global Creative Director at NIKE for twelve years where she developed major product, merchandising and brand strategies, solidifying NIKE at the top of its industry. She worked as a creative director and brand strategy consultant in the fields of design, innovation and technology and spent many years in the design of consumer products and electronics in both the US and Germany.

Using her work in the classroom, her scholarship endowment, and her experienced voice as a platform to raise awareness to the inequities in our built world, Karen encourages women to pursue careers in male dominated fields of design, architecture and engineering, make their voices heard, and assure that the female body is considered at every level of the design process-- from data, to design, to policy.