Renny Ramakers


Renny Ramakers is a Dutch art historian, design critic, and co-founder and director of the Droog design foundation. In 2007 she was awarded the Benno Premsela Prize.

Life and work

Ramakers graduated in art history at the University of Leiden in 1982. Her graduation work published in 1984 was about the Nederlandsche Bond voor Kunst in Industrie, a Dutch union for arts and crafts and industrial design.
Later in the 1980s Ramakers wrote articles about design in the national newspapers NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant. In 1987 she joined forces with Christine de Baan and Ed Annink and founded the Foundation Products of Imagination, which initiated and organized multiple design projects and publications.
In the 1990s Ramakers was editor-in-chief of the design magazine Industrieel ontwerpen.. After the merger of this magazine with the Items, Tijdschrift voor vormgeving in 1993 she was editor-in-chief of the new magazine for some time.
In 1992 as still editor in chief of Industrieel ontwerpen Ramakers had been impressed by the new generation of Dutch designers. At Galery Marzee in Nijmegen she had discovered the work of Jurgen Bey and Jan Konings. The following year she presented this with similar work at the stand of her magazine at the Courtray Design Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk. Driven by that success, she coined the umbrella term Droog Design, and presented this work at the Milan Furniture Fair in Milan in 1993. With Gijs Bakker, she subsequently founded Droog for the promotion and distribution of this new design.
Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers developed Droog in the Netherlands and abroad in the next decade until Gijs Bakker went his own way again in 2009. Ramakers and Gijs Bakker were awarded the Benno Premsela Prize in 2007.

Publicaties, een selectie