John Dunni­gan is a designer, maker, author, and educa­tor. His studio work span­ning fifty years has been shown in more than one hundred exhi­bi­tions, includ­ing ten solo exhi­bi­tions, and is included in private and public collec­tions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the RISD Museum in Prov­i­dence and the Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Museum in Wash­ing­ton, DC. 

Dunnigan’s furni­ture has been featured in dozens of publi­ca­tions, such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Boston Globe, in cata­logues, and in books, includ­ing Edward S. Cooke’s New Amer­i­can Furni­ture (1989) and Witold Rybczynski’s Now I Sit Me Down (2016). In addi­tion to main­tain­ing his own studio prac­tice since 1975, he was a partner in DEZCO Furni­ture Design LLC (2004 – 2010) and Windels Dunni­gan (2018 – 2019), collab­o­ra­tions dedi­cated to sustain­able prac­tices in design for afford­able produc­tion. He has published several essays on the cultural context of furni­ture and has lectured frequently on furni­ture as an expres­sion of culture and identity.

A dedi­cated teacher, Dunni­gan was a member of the faculty at RISD for forty five years. During the first fifteen years, he taught in the depart­ments of Inte­rior Archi­tec­ture and Indus­trial Design. In 1995, he was a co-founder of the Depart­ment of Furni­ture Design, where he had a lead­er­ship role in devel­op­ing the curricu­lum, espe­cially the Sopho­more Studio, the History of Furni­ture, and the Senior Degree Project, where he mentored many students who have gone on to success­ful careers. Dunni­gan was Depart­ment Head of Furni­ture Design for many years (2005 – 08 and 2010 – 17), and he served as Interim Dean of the Divi­sion of Archi­tec­ture + Design in 2008-09. He is a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the RISD Museum (2015 – 18). Dunni­gan was the Schiller Family Endowed Chair in Furni­ture Design at RISD from 2015 until his retire­ment in 2025 when he became Professor Emeritus.