Chief designer for Lincoln Aviator SUV is brand’s new design director

The man behind the looks of cars like the 50th anniversary 2015 Ford Mustang, the current-generation Lincoln Continental and the luxury division’s new 2020 Aviator SUV is Lincoln’s newest design director. Kemal Curic replaces David Woodhouse, who left earlier this year and is now a vice president overseeing design at Nissan and Infiniti.

Curic, 41, was born in Sarajevo and grew up in Germany and Croatia. He began his career with Ford of Europe in 2003 after earning a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and a master’s in transportation design in Germany. There, he worked on the European version of the Fiesta, the Mondeo (the European version of the Fusion) and the Kuga compact SUV.

In 2010, Curic won a global sketch competition Ford created to pick a designer for the 50th anniversary Mustang. He moved to Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, where he joined the design team for the 2015 Ford Mustang, which won the EyesOn Design award for Best Production Vehicle at the 2014 Detroit auto show.

Curic became exterior design manager in 2014 for the reborn Lincoln Continental sedan, then lead the overhaul of the brand’s design language. He became chief designer for the three-row Aviator, which debuted at the 2018 L.A. Auto Show, and he served a lead exterior designer on the all-new 2020 Corsair, Lincoln’s compact crossover that was formerly known as the MKC.

In an interview earlier this month with Truck Trend, Curic talked about how the midsize Aviator exemplifies Lincoln’s new design ethos. “This is the anti-wedge, which is very elegant,” he said. “If you think about cars of the 1960s, they had that exuberant attitude with more anti-wedge than most vehicles today. Think about the angle of attack of an airplane. You have this gliding gesture, sort of leaning back. The anti-wedge, a teardrop shape, is also the most optimized shape for aerodynamics.”

Curic has said he was captivated by American cars as a child growing up in Europe, and he told Truck Trend that he grew up doodling cars in his notebooks at school, which sometimes got him in trouble and made his parents worry.

He’ll reportedly split his time between Dearborn and Lincoln’s design studio in Irvine, California, where he lives with his family.