Fellowship Program
The DesignInquiry Fellowship is a year-long program that provides support for a small cohort of emerging and established thinkers and makers who seek a platform to sustain extended peer-to-peer conversation, explore open-ended collaboration, and leverage access to the DesignInquiry universe.
Cohorts are assembled each year through an ever-evolving application process and fellows are invited to kick off their fellowship at an in-person gathering hosted by DesignInquiry. The fellowship year continues through regular fellow-led and -organized virtual meetings with invited guests, and DesignInquiry alumni and culminates with the realization of a collaborative project conceived and developed by the cohort.
Applications for the 2023-2024 DesignInquiry Fellowship program have closed. We will announce the 2023–24 Fellows soon and they will kick-off their fellowship by gathering alongside DesignInquiry’s Work/Around inquiry in London from September 17 to 24.
2023–24 Fellows
Lindsay Buchman is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and publisher living and working in Hudson, NY. Her work explores image-making and writing through print and lens-based media, artist books, and installation. Pivoting between text and image, she is primarily concerned with the intersections of language, intersubjectivity, and site to puncture a sense of concrete time and space—both cognitive and embodied. Buchman holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from California State University Long Beach. Buchman is a 2023-24 Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Printshop and a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College. As an extension of her practice, she runs an independent artists' books and publications project, Seaton Street Press, to collaborate with artists through publishing and distribution.
Wylie Kasai (he/him) is a designer and technologist born and based in Los Angeles, CA. He looks for and exploits the boundaries between the artist and technology, augmenting his printmaking practice with creative coding. Inputs include photos, illustrations, and computer-generated graphics; outputs include screenprint, risograph, and laser prints. Wylie holds a B.A. in both Computer Science and Studio Art from Dartmouth College and is finishing his M.S. in Computer Science with a Concentration in Digital Arts there as well.
maya rae oppenheimer is the founder and co-director of OK Stamp Press. She’s also a daughter, sister, aunt, plant-parent of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives joy and financial remuneration as an educator/researcher/artist. She was born in Treaty 1 Territory and spent over a decade living in London (UK). maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien’kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with book- and paper-making, language as an artist’s material and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews. Experimental writing, performance, critical pedagogy, mutual-aid publishing, DIY tactics and rogue archival gestures make up her tool-kit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in Art History and now works in the Department of Studio Arts. Personal website perpetually under construction.
Sarah Woodward is a design-based artist. She explores how sensory input impacts the individual’s experience of place through a variety of mediums including bookmaking, photography, poetry and ceramics. She received her BFA with a concentration in graphic design from The University of Connecticut in 2021. She completed her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in fine art from The Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy in 2022. Sarah is currently a resident artist at Art Gym Denver in Colorado and will have her first professional exhibition in January 2024. She studied French and Italian and seeks to combine her passions for written and visual communication. Sarah was awarded the Emerging Student Artist Award at the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival in 2019 and 2021. Sarah is also a sailor and marathon runner who continues to be inspired by the natural world. She was raised by an educator and a craftsman who fostered her creativity and sparked her curiosity for design. Sarah has worked as a graphic designer at Squared Labs, a stone and tile company and freelance. Her multidisciplinary practice informs the way she approaches design problems and enriches her work. the Emerging Student Artist Award at the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival, one of the country's largest juried art shows, in 2019 and 2021.
2022–23 Fellows
Sarah Alfarhan is a West Asian educator, graphic designer, and illustrator based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She holds a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts, PA, and an MS in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, NY. Her artistic practice revolves around self-publishing and working with paper and formats of multiplicity. Inspired by language (spoken and signed), she looks for implications by playing with the delicate task of translation and interpretation - presenting a layer of misunderstandings and cultural connotations.
Jordan Carey is a Bermudian designer and artist based in Portland, Maine. In January 2020, Carey launched Loquat, a fashion and lifestyle brand focused on empowering marginalized people. The loquat plum was first brought to Bermuda by the British and symbolizes displacement, migration, and community for Carey. These sentiments that represent the Bermuda Loquat's story inform the brand's sense of community, collaboration, and storytelling.
Taylor Miles Hopkins is a visual designer from the east coast of the United States currently based in Seattle, Washington. She holds a Master of Design degree from the University of Washington, Her main design interests are in bookmaking and other publishing practices, the intersection of design with climate change and environmental connection, and the ways design can establish and nurture communities within these two realms. Taylor currently works as a visual designer for agencies, studios, and in-house teams and has been a guest lecturer in visual communication within the Human Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington.
Jordan Steyer is a designer, artist, and researcher from El Paso, Texas. Her practice uses the Risograph printer and self-publishing to explore everyday occurrences and social issues, especially ones that have impacted her community. She holds a Bachelor of Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin, and she's currently a MFA candidate in Communication Design at Texas State University where she helped transform the RISO Studio from a storage closet into a community space with open printing and workshops.
2021–22 Fellows
Krishna Balakrishnan is a visual artist and curator who uses graphic design, research and criticism to visually communicate ideas of everyday human experience (in and out of linear perspective) and cultural sustainability. In his visual art, he creates representation of hybrid identities through mixing concepts and materials relating to Hindu epics and myths, comic-book superheroes and Disney princesses; images and text intertwine to narrate a collection of diverse cultural references. He creates illustrations, collages, screen and Intaglio prints. He designs for books, magazines, posters, letters, marketing materials and websites. With a multi-disciplinary practice across a diverse clientele, Krishna currently works for London’s Natural History Museum, as a graphic designer within the temporary exhibition team at the design department. He also teaches Contextual and Theoretical Studies at the Design School, London College of Communication and Central Saint Martins. He has a Master of Design degree from York University in Toronto, Canada and an MA in curation from Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London.
Krishna’s fellowship proposal talks about “Prepostness” in a philosophical and pedagogical way. He says: “It is philosophical from my own development process. Arundhati Roy’s Financial Times article from the beginning of the global pandemic lockdown states that “the pandemic is a portal.” She explains that “in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” The exposed inequalities that have surfaced during this pandemic, and feeling underwhelmed by traditional graphic design’s position in facilities to such disparities, has prompted me to exit from corporate design and focus on cultural studies in graphic design. I see my exit as an outcome, but at the same time a way for me to develop a practice that extends beyond being a problem, but rather a critical discourse.”
Sarah Elawad is a multidisciplinary designer born and raised in the UK, with family roots in Sudan. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University of the Arts in Doha, Qatar. Based everywhere and nowhere, Sarah is co-director for the experimental printing project Water With Water based in Qatar. She recently completed a design residency at the Fabrica Research Centre in Treviso, Italy and will be starting her MFA in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art in the Fall. Sarah has a current strong interest in internet art, digital collage and experimental graphics. Her hybrid family history and travel lifestyle has influenced her work to centre around the cultural relationships between the West and the Middle East.
Sarah will be using her fellowship to explore the relationship between the ideal worlds we go to when we imagine, and the ideal worlds we interact with through technology. She would like to delve deeper into the human ability to imagine, attempting to mindfully design or bring imaginations to life whilst monitoring how the information and content we are exposed to on social media influences or does not influence our idealized worlds.
Samer Fouad is an artist and graphic designer. Although his degree is in graphic design, Fouad considers himself a mixed media artist, combining sculpture, video, graphic design, photography, digital collage, and various printmaking methods. His work has been showcased around the world, including New York City, Japan, Qatar, France, Spain, Italy and Hungary. Fouad has been published in The AIGA, Adweek, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and Design Sponge. Fouad has lectured and given design-based workshops at many universities and studios around the world, and recently gave a TEDTalk titled “Comfort Kills Creativity.” Fouad was an artist-in-residence for the Mana BSMT program, located at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, and Nouvelle Vague Gallery in Marbella, Spain. He is a co-founder of the Newark Print Shop in New Jersey. Simultaneous to his career as an artist, Fouad taught advanced printmaking and graphic design in the undergraduate BFA program and book arts in the MFA program at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He was also a teaching assistant in visual communication design for the undergraduate School of Art and Design and was a lecturer for the Masters program of the School of Human Centered Design and Engineering, at The University of Washington. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Design at Pacific Lutheran University. Samer Fouad holds a BFA degree BFA from the Arts, Culture and Media program at Rutgers University with a concentration in graphic design and a minor in art history. He also holds a Master of Design degree from the University of Washington.
Samer Fouad is currently living in the prepostness of his new body of work. During this fellowship, he hopes to collaborate with other design-based artists who work with their hands as much as their keyboards. He wants to create something that will outlast him. He wants an exquisite corpse of objectivity, an artifact that allow form to follow function and upholds 1+1=3.
Andy Campbell and Jessica Brier are using their fellowship to work on a prospective book project entitled Displaying Design: Life Imagined in Objects, Graphics, and Fashion from 1851 to Today, a sourcebook offering a selected history of design exhibitions. They think such a text is long overdue. While compendiums of historical exhibitions already exist for art and architecture (wherein sometimes design is a bit player), there is not yet a book that takes a broad overview of key exhibitions that have featured objects and practices of graphic, industrial, and fashion design. They want this book to showcase design’s ability to produce and question the time in which it is made, and because exhibitions are temporary, spatially constructed narratives, they are a perfect aperture to engage with a broader history of design.
Andy Campbell is a historian and critic of art and design who foregrounds LGBTQ communities and archives as wellsprings for alternative histories. He is the author of two books—Queer X Design: 50 Years of Signs, Symbols, Banners, Logos, and Graphic Art of LGBTQ (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2019) and Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2020)—and, along with Amelia Jones, co-edited the catalog Queer Communion: Ron Athey (Intellect, 2020), which was named one of the “Best Art Books of 2020” by The New York Times. His criticism and academic writing can be found in Artforum, The Invisible Archive, GLQ, Aperture, and Dress, amongst other venues. He holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Oberlin College. He currently works in Los Angeles, California as an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s Roski School of Art + Design, and he lives in Long Beach.
Jessica Brier is a curator and historian of art and design specializing in the intermediality of photography, printmaking, graphic design, and the built environment. She currently serves as Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Formerly, she was a curatorial assistant in photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she worked on exhibitions including Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa (2014), South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk (2012-2013), and Francesca Woodman (2011-2012). Her writing has appeared in Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (DelMonico Books, 2019) and in art on paper, Curating Now, and on SFMOMA’s blog, Open Space. She holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Southern California, an MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts, and a BA from New York University.