Alberto Cairo (born 1974 in

A Coruña A Coruña (; es, La Coruña ; historical English: Corunna or The Groyne) is a city and municipality of Galicia, Spain. A Coruña is the most populated city in Galicia and the second most populated municipality in the autonomous community and ...

) is a Spanish information designer and professor. Cairo is the Knight Chair in

Visual Journalism Visual journalism is the practice of strategically combining words and images to convey information. Universal Visual journalism is premised upon the idea that at a time of accelerating change, often words cannot keep pace with concepts. Visual ...

at the School of Communication of the

University of Miami The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private research university in Coral Gables, Florida. , the university enrolled 19,096 students in 12 colleges and schools across nearly 350 academic majors and programs, ...

Education

Cairo holds a BA in

Journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (pro ...

from the

University of Santiago de Compostela The University of Santiago de Compostela - USC ( gl, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela - USC, es, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela - USC) is a public university located in the city of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. A second ...

, and MA and PhD from the

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya The Open University of Catalonia ( ca, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC; ) is a private open university based in Barcelona, Spain. The UOC offers graduate and postgraduate programs in Catalan, Spanish and English in fields such as Psycholog ...

(in

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ...

Career

Cairo began working as a journalist in the late 1990s, at ''La Voz de Galicia'' (The Voice of Galicia), and then at ''Diario 16'' (Diary 16) where he worked on print graphics. He then worked as a data-journalist and information designer at El Mundo, Spain's second largest printed daily newspaper, where he experimented with emerging tools like Macromedia Flash to make multimedia infographics. He became the director of the paper's online component, supervising five people, at a time when very few global newspapers were doing similar graphical work. Notable multimedia articles included the paper's coverage of the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commerc ...

in the US in 2001, and the

2004 Madrid train bombings The 2004 Madrid train bombings (also known in Spain as 11M) were a series of coordinated, nearly simultaneous bombings against the Cercanías commuter train system of Madrid, Spain, on the morning of 11 March 2004—three days before Spain's g ...

. In 2005, Cairo was hired by the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which r ...

to teach Flash, 3D animation, and interactive graphics. He returned to the publishing world in 2007, now based in

São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the Ga ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

, where he worked on graphics for the magazine '' Época''. He was the director for Infographics and Multimedia at

Editora Globo Editora Globo S.A. (Globo Editors) is a Brazilian publishing house, property of Fundação Roberto Marinho. It began as a bookstore called Livraria do Globo, created in Porto Alegre, in December 1883, by Laudelino Pinheiro de Barcellos and Satu ...

in Brazil. Cairo returned to the world of education in 2012 at the University of Miami. That year, he created the first

Massive Open Online Course A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, ma ...

in journalism, “Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization,” with the

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas The Moody College of Communication is the communication college at The University of Texas at Austin. The college is home to top-ranked programs in advertising and public relations, communication studies, communication sciences and disorders, jo ...

. Cairo teaches for the journalism department and the Master of Fine Arts in Interactive Media program, and is the director of the visualization program at the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing.

Books

* ''The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization'' (2012) * ''The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication'' (2016). * '' How Charts Lie (2019).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cairo, Alberto Living people American digital artists Spanish digital artists University of Miami faculty University of Santiago de Compostela alumni American male journalists Spanish male journalists American people of Spanish descent 1974 births