Laurene Leon Boym and some of Boym Partners’ Salvation ceramics for Moooi
This is the fourth profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week’s profile here.
Try everything and go where your interests lead you. That could be the underpinning business philosophy of Laurene Leon Boym, one half of Boym Partners Inc. It was in that spirit that Boym recently found herself living in Doha, Qatar, and writing design challenges for a Pan-Arabian reality TV show called Stars of Science.
“It’s like the Project Runway of the Middle East,” Boym says. Her 15 years as a teacher at places like Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts helped Boym distill complicated design tasks into mini-challenges that the contestants could play out on screen.
Boym was in Doha because her husband and business partner, Constantin Boym, had been asked to direct the first graduate design program for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Qatar campus. The couple uprooted and moved their design practice to the Middle East in 2010 and only recently returned to New York City. Boym is now writing a book about being an expat designer in Qatar, where the discipline of design is still in the nascent stages. “It’s a very new society over there,” she says.
Boym Partners’ 2007 Babel Blocks celebrate the diverse mix of races, religions and cultures in New York City.
Writing is just one of the many aspects of Boym’s design practice. She is also a product designer for clients like Alessi and Swatch; a consultant to international businesses and cultural organizations; a curator and an exhibiting artist for major museums; and a teacher, lecturer, critic, mentor. And, of course, she is the designer of quirky objects that fall somewhere between products and artworks: The Boyms’ series Buildings of Disaster, which included miniature replicas of Chernobyl and the Unabomber’s cabin, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Boym also founded the Association of Women Industrial Designers in 1992 because “when I started out, there weren’t as many women in the profession,” she says.
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