Portfolio Admissions is headed by Allison Warren, a former admissions recruiter, professional artist-designer, adjunct professor and creative business owner who has been working with creative students since 2000.

Allison is a former admissions recruiter at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 2015-2023. In this role, Allison honed application strategies and creative portfolios for potential applicants. Allison also has consulted for Polygence Inc., a San Francisco-based firm that provides achieving students supplemental academic research opportunities. In this role, she mentored projects ranging from the creation of a sustainable fashion brand to a research paper on the Pantheon’s dome architecture.

At the core, Allison is a teacher. While at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she taught foundational through grad level courses including original course work in design entrepreneurship, sustainable textile manufacturing and product design. Prior to SAIC, Allison wrote the curriculum and managed the design foundations program in Architecture at the University of Illinois from 2006-2014.

Her current creative practice is focused on textile curation and product manufacturing with her business, Modernplum Textiles. Prior, Allison’s gallery artwork received critical notice from curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of Art, and the Banff Centre in Ontario, Canada among others.

Allison started her career in the Arts as an advertising executive in New York City after receiving a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. She went on to receive an MFA from Cranbrook Academy in Detroit.