Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and is also affiliated with the Critical Media Practice program in Visual and Environmental Studies. 

Schnapp is the editor of the metaLAB projects series with MIT Press. Among his current writing projects is the Library Test Kitchen Cookbook, a collaborative recipe-book for innovation in the design of learning spaces, and a study of the artist-designer Bruno Munari, entitled Bruno Munari, A to Z (Phaidon). 

Schnapp’s pioneering work in the domains of media, knowledge design, digital arts and humanities, and curatorial practice includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Fondazione Cirulli. His collaborative Trento Tunnels project?a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum?was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la citta e il pianeta (fall-winter 2011). Panorama of the Cold War, carried out with Elisabetta Terragni (Studio Terragni Architetti) and Daniele Ledda (XY comm), was exhibited in the Albanian Pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and in Erasmus Effect ? Architetti italiani all’estero / Italian Architects Abroad at the MAXXI (Dec. 2013-April 2014). He also served as lead curator for BZ ’18-’45, a documentation center built under Marcello Piacentini’s Monument to Victory in Bolzano/Bozen open to the public since July 2014. BZ ’18-’45 was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2016 Museum of the Year competition by the European Museum Forum. His most recent curatorial project, Universo futurista / Futurist Universe, opened at the Fondazione Cirulli in Bologna on April 21, 2018.  

After three years of service as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Piaggio Fast Forward, Schnapp assumed the new position of Chief Visionary Officer effective mid-June 2018. Piaggio Fast Forward is a subsidiary of the Milan-based Piaggio Group, known throughout the world for iconic vehicles like the Vespa and iconic brands like Aprilia and Moto Guzzi. Piaggio Fast Forward’s first generation of robotic vehicles has received worldwide coverage on television, radio, and the www, including in forums such as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Times (London), Time Magazine, Wired, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, CNN Tech, CBS’s Innovation Nation, Cheddar, SlashGear, Dezeen, and Endgadget. Its mobile-carrier Gita has also won numerous design and engineering awards, including selection as one of the 2018 Beazley Best Designs of the Year at the Design Museum (London), a wild card finalist in the 2018 Extreme Tech Challenge, and a silver medal at the 11th International Spark Awards in the transport category.