I am (also) a wordsmith, writing mainly on architecture, design, digital media, ceramics, and photography.

I’ve published in national newspapers, specialist magazines, books, artist monographs, and exhibition catalogues, in the US, UK, and Europe.

A list of my published writings is here and links to recent essays are here.

My first book-length collection: Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bauhaus: Portraits in Architecture and Design — Selected Writings of Janet Abrams was published by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, in 2020.

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Straight out of my undergraduate architecture degree, I trained as a journalist in my native London at trade publisher Morgan Grampian, becoming Features Editor of its weekly newspaper Building Design at age 23. I also filed stories as London correspondent for Skyline, published by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York.

In 1983, I took off for America on a Fulbright Scholarship to do my Ph.D. at Princeton University, just as Blueprint magazine was launching in London. As its U.S. Correspondent, I'd frequently abscond from Princeton's leafy campus and fly People Express to various U.S. cities, to write critiques of new buildings and profiles of their architects. This was the era of the fax, Mac SEs, and 35mm transparencies sent to London by courier (whose liveried representatives would literally show up at my dorm room to collect my copy and images).

Back in London in the late 1980s, I began writing for the Arts page of The Independent, the new broadsheet national newspaper—first on architecture, and later on photography. I learned to write to a pre-determined page layout and word-length using ATEX software, and to cut and completely rewrite my feature in a matter of hours, before it went to press for the next day's paper. I wrote on film and visual arts for Sight & Sound and New Statesman & Society, and between deadlines, somehow completed my doctoral dissertation (Princeton University, 1989).

I joined Punch as Features Editor (when this venerable weekly humor magazine was attempting to revive itself for a younger readership, à la Spy magazine) then served as Guest Editor of Blueprint for a few months during the editor’s sabbatical, before taking a job in Chicago.

In the early 1990s, having moved to New York, I became Writer-at-Large for I.D. International Design magazine (not to be confused with i.D., the fashion and music magazine). With the Internet in the ascendant, I focused on the design aspects of new media, writing profiles of information design pioneers such as Muriel Cooper of MIT’s Visible Language Workshop, and Bob Stein of the Voyager Company. I also contributed to various US and European publications, including Domus, frieze, Lotus International, Metropolis, Ottagono, Print, The New York Times magazine.

As Director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute (2000-2008), I launched a publishing program spanning print, broadcasting and digital media. The DI co-produced TV programs with Twin Cities Public Television; made video documentaries of our Design Camp for teens program (2002, 2003 editions) and our 2003 Big Urban Game. We published two award-winning books, Metro Letters: A Typeface for the Twin Cities, and Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories; numerous poster-sized Knowledge Maps on topics ranging from the design of the US election system to digital fabrication methods; a boxed set of nine alternative cartographies of the Twin Cities; and The Knowledge Circuit, an online review of global digital media conferences, on the DI’s website.

Having shifted my career towards physical making, my writing has also shifted—towards the relationship between analog and digital; the meaning of the hand-made in an age of digital fabrication; ceramics as fine art; and the paradoxes and persistence of craft production in an era of globalized manufacturing.