Audrey G. Bennett, a naturalized American scholar of Afro-Caribbean descent, is the 2022 AIGA Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary medalist; a 2019 inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan; a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a 1997 College Art Association Professional Development Fellow.

As a graphic design scholar and cultural critic, Bennett uses her hands, heart, mind, and heritage to engage in critical reading, writing, and thinking on social images toward transforming them with interactive aesthetics (IA). Her current research agenda diverges towards multiple lines of creative inquiry on the use of multimodal images whose visual and verbal language facilitate or evoke multisensory interaction with lay people to enable cross-cultural resonance and yield cognitive change, behavioral change, and more recently, socioeconomic change toward equity and "generative justice" (Eglash 2016).

Bennett conducts creative and theoretical research within Baohouse, a virtual design studio she founded circa 2005. Baohouse is an immaterial and motile collaborative research space where she leads studies on how IA can engage lay people with socially and environmentally transformative images that use multimodal visual language to evoke multisensory user responses. In her early work, Bennett straddled research and creative practice, disseminating her findings via peer-reviewed publications for books and journals and artwork for juried exhibitions. Today, her work focuses on research with scholarly outputs disseminated primarily via peer-reviewed publications. 

Bennett is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Image and Text (South Africa), New Design Ideas (Azerbaijan), and A2RU’s Groundworks Journal (USA). She is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association and the Board of Directors of the Detroit and Upstate New York chapters of AIGA, the professional association of design. 

Bennett holds an M.F.A. degree in graphic design from Yale University and a B.A. in studio art from Dartmouth College.