David Galenson

Who is David Galenson?

David W. Galenson is a professor in the Department of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the American University of Paris. He is the Academic Director of the Center for Creativity Economics, which was inaugurated in 2010 at the Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires.

He is the son of economists Marjorie and Walter Galenson. He attended Phillips Academy. He then studied at Harvard University for both his undergraduate and graduate education, completing his PhD in 1979.

Galenson has become famous for postulating a new theory of artistic creativity. Based on a study of the ages at which various innovative artists made their greatest contributions to the field, Galenson's theory divides all artists into two classes: Conceptualists, who make radical innovations in their field at a very early age; and Experimentalists, whose innovations develop slowly over a long period of experimentation and refinement.