Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer and educator with nearly 20 years of experience. She currently serves as the Head of Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to that, she was a founding partner of MGMT design, a collaborative women-owned graphic design studio whose projects focused on exhibition design as well as museum publications, print, branding, and data visualization. Alicia has also worked as a senior designer for Method, New York, and was a co-design director at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. She currently serves as an external critic for the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at Yale University, Maryland Institute College of Art, Barnard College, and the Cooper Union School of Art. Alicia was a past board member of the AIGA/NY chapter and the Fine Arts Federation, a design advocacy consortium in New York City. She has written articles for The Atlantic Magazine and the New Yorker online and in 2020 she published "This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot" (Princeton Architectural Press), with a companion exhibition at the Cooper Union.

Alicia’s engagement with Italy began in in high school. Her mother, Mignonette Yin Cheng, was a professor of fine art at the University of Michigan and began teaching at the university's program in Florence in 1984. Alicia returned to Florence over several summers, assisting all faculty and helping organize student art and art history tours and trips.