Niels Schrader

Niels Schrader was born in 1977 in Caracas, Venezuela. He took up studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf in 1997 and graduated in Communication Design in 2003. Hereafter he enrolled for the master programme at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. He worked as a freelance designer for Uwe Loesch and Irma Boom and set up his own studio in Amsterdam in 2005.

Among his major clients are the Mondriaan Foundation, the DasArts Foundation, the Amsterdam School of the Arts (ahk/L), the Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, the Berlage Institute, the Graphic Design Museum Breda, Museum De Paviljoens, Episode Publishers, Slewe Gallery, and KCAP Architects&Planners. He currently teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. In 2008 he worked as a guest critic in design at the Delft University of Technology.

His conceptual design is based on a ‘dialogue principle’ which translates digital information into physical media, and vice versa. This transformation process of data from one state of aggregation to the next often results in new stimulating forms of artistic expression.

Schrader has received several awards and nominations, including the red dot: best of the best, the iF communication design award and the Certificate of Typographic Excellence. For his work with digital source codes he was nominated in the category ‘Net-Art’ for the Internet Society Award Nederland 2006.

His short film White Blackout was screened at various film festivals such as the Weimar backup_festival, the Biggest Visual Power Show in Essen, the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, the Milano Film Festival and The Int’l Fest of Cinema and Technology in Los Angeles.