Lisa Mahar is an American photographer, architect, and designer. She lives and works in Santa Barbara, California.

Born in Florida in 1965 and raised partly in Brazil, she trained as an architect at Virginia Tech under Olivio Ferrari, in a program whose Bauhaus-derived curriculum treated photography, printmaking, and building as a single discipline. She spent nearly forty years in New York, where she worked for Polshek and Partners on the restoration of Carnegie Hall and for Aldo Rossi, designing two monographs of his work, before practicing as a principal of Mahar, Adjmi and Partners.

Her first book, Grain Elevators (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993; foreword by Aldo Rossi), a typological study of the North American elevator as vernacular monument, received the American Institute of Architects International Architecture Book Award. Her second, American Signs: Form and Meaning on Route 66 (Monacelli Press, 2002), examines mid-century commercial signage through photographs, diagrams, and annotation; Rick Poynor named it among the books every graphic designer should read. She contributed an essay on Charles Demuth’s My Egypt to the Whitney Museum’s Frames of Reference (1999).

In 2002 she founded Kid O, a children’s toy company and West Village store that New York magazine named the city’s best toy store. Its signature product, the Magnatab, was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 exhibition The Value of Good Design and in Phaidon’s Design for Children (2018). Kid O was acquired by PlayMonster in 2018.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

PUBLICATIONS
Design for Children. Selected work by Lisa Mahar, Phaidon, 2018
American Signs: Form and Meaning on Route 66. The Monacelli Press, 2002
Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900-1950: Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Essay by Lisa Mahar, University of California Press, 1999
Grain Elevators. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Value of Good Design Exhibition, Design Lab. 2019

GRANTS AND AWARDS
AIA International Book Award, 1993
National Endowment for the Arts, Design Arts Award, 1992
New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Grant, 1991