Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is an American graphic designer, artist, and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design. In 1971, de Bretteville founded the first design program for women at the California Institute of the Arts, and two years later co-founded the Woman's Building, a public center in Los Angeles dedicated to women's education and culture. In 1973, she founded the Women’s Graphic Center, and with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop—both based at the Woman's Building. She designed a necklace of an eye bolt on a chain, meant to represent "strength without a fist"; she gave the first of these to Arlene Raven and Judy Chicago when they started the Feminist Studio Workshop in 1972. Since then she has given them to other women with whom she shares a vision of the creation of women's culture. She also created "Pink" for an exhibition about color at the American Institute of Graphic Arts; the broadside was meant to explore the notions of gender as associated with the color pink, and various women including many in the Feminist Studio Workshop submitted entries exploring their association with the color. She arranged the squares of paper to form a “quilt” from which posters were printed and disseminated throughout Los Angeles. As a result, de Bretteville earned the nickname "Pinky." In 1980, she initiated the communication design program at the Otis College of Art and Design, believing that the communal forms of art were an essential component of the Feminist Art Movement in the U.S. In 1990 she became the director of the Yale University Graduate Program in Graphic Design and the first woman to receive tenure at the Yale University School of Art. De Bretteville has worked extensively in the field of public art creating works embedded within city neighborhoods. One of her best-known pieces is "Biddy Mason's Place: A Passage of Time”—an 82-foot concrete wall with embedded objects in downtown Los Angeles that tells the story of Biddy Mason, a former slave who became a midwife in Los Angeles and lived near the site. In “Path of Stars,” completed in 1994 in a New Haven neighborhood, de Bretteville documented the lives of local citizens, past and present, with 21 granite stars set in the sidewalk. She is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been honored with many awards such as a 2009 “Grandmaster” award from the New York Art Directors Club and a “Design Legend Gold Medal” from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2004), “Best Public Artwork” recognition from Americans for the Arts (2005), and honorary doctorates from the Moore College of Art and California College of the Arts.