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Faculty | Tim McNeil

Tim McNeil
office: 220 Walker Hall
phone: 752-2589
email: tjmcneil

Tim McNeil is an Assistant Professor in the Design Program and Director of the UC Davis Design Museum. He has twenty years of exhibition planning and creative design experience with a variety of museums, science, and interpretive centers. He is also a principal in the design and research practice Muniz/McNeil, whose past projects include the renovation of gallery spaces at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and a state-of-the-art environmental action center for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s headquarters in Santa Monica, CA. In 2003, this project held the distinction as the first “green” exhibition and interpretive center in the nations “greenest” LEED platinum certified building.

For fifteen years McNeil was a senior designer at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he participated in the design of over seventy exhibition environments, interpretive spaces, and an award winning wayfinding and signage system. McNeil provided design leadership for the ambitious exhibition interpretive guidelines used in the permanent collection galleries when they opened at the Getty Center in 1997. They have since served as an influential model for many "other art museums and were further refined for the reopening of the Getty Villa in 2006.

McNeil is an authority on sustainable design solutions for exhibition environments, and serves on the California Association of Museums Green Museum Initiative. He is on the education taskforce for Society for Environmental Graphic Design developing a national curriculum for the education of museum and exhibition designers. He has a BA in Graphic Design from Middlesex University, and a MA in Exhibition Design from University of the Arts, London. He has received recognition for design excellence from the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, the University and College Designers Association, and the American Association of Museums. His work has been featured in several books and magazines including Interiors magazine and Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic Navigational Systems.

Courses taught: Exhibition Design, Environmental Graphics, Narrative Environments, Design Museum Internship.