Emily Balton

Emily Balton is a graphic designer and interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between environmental graphic design, public art, time-based media, and generative AI research. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in sign manufacturing, advertising, and large-scale corporate production, she specializes in projects that connect the arts, built environment, and community placemaking initiatives to create work with civic meaning.

Her research centers on the ethical integration of generative AI into design workflows, translated into educational models that prepare students for navigating an AI-mediated design culture. Her research interests include human agency in the human-machine creative exchange, how individuals internalize norms of evolving digital platforms and algorithmic structures, and the cultural, cognitive, and behavioral changes happening at the creative, client, and consumer levels of the design industry.

Emily’s time-based media work investigates human agency, identity, and culture across music video, motion graphics, and illustration through traditional and generative AI production workflows. Her time-based work has been selected for national and international exhibitions in the US and Asia. Collaborative design projects include the University of Memphis Department of Art and Design x BlueOval City sculpture at Ford Motor Company’s manufacturing plant in Stanton, Tennessee, for which she created the legend of 18 designed symbols and their meanings laser-cut into the sculpture.

She developed “What If We,” a workshop experience designed to foster self-agency, identity, and creative leadership through project-based collaborative work at the intersection of emerging design technology and community engagement.