Teaching, Talks

A lecture on translation and writing the senses for David Reinfurt’s r-e-s-e-a-r-c-h class at Princeton.

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With Laurel Schwulst for her school Ultralight, a writing and publishing class about translation and the senses. Over five weeks, participants engage in readings and discussion about the five senses and explore what it means to carry sensations over into written form. How can a fragrance become a poem? What are the different ways to write an image, or to document a sound? Ursula K. Le Guin says, “all writing is translation” — from the perceptual into language. Similarly, we look toward the senses to expand our use of language and to strengthen our writing voices. By the end of class, we’ll collect and publish some of our experiments into a publication.

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A graduate seminar for the graphic design department at VCU in Spring 2025. In a sense, all writing and art-making is an act of translation — an approximation of the original source, idea, or feeling, rendered into something new. Translation can also happen across media or senses: art writing, at its best, translates perception and sensation into language. Graphic notation visualizes sound; architectural notation turns space into symbols. In this seminar, we’ll look at work that manifests in many different forms and consider what’s gained and what’s lost in translation. We’ll also build a writing practice, with a special focus on writing the senses: visuals, sound, scent, etc.

We published a book and a website of our writings (Say Sense is Not Everything) a weekly newsletter (Bad Sense) over the course of the semester.

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Invited by Nontsi Mutiti to be a guest critic on the thesis review panels for MFA second year graphic designs at Yale School of the Arts.

A talk about image and text at the Desire Paths symposium at Virginia Tech, organized by Mariah Barden Jones and Raegan Bird.

A graduate seminar on writing for the graphic design department at VCU. Through readings, discussion, and writing exercises, the class explores images and ideas that “shimmer around the edges” (Didion) and writing as the “shimmering go-between” (Nabokov). The first section looks closely at writing that starts with the image — whether a photograph, artwork or memory — and considers that if designers and artists are perhaps more equipped than most at preserving those images, understanding their importance, and making them legible to themselves or to others, then writing can be thought of as just another form of image-making. The second half of the semester engages with writing that starts with collection or accumulation. We’ll sit with the sort of shimmering that happens when you come across an image, an object, or a passage in a book that resonates, and the kind of meaning-making that writing can do when it connects the disparate material that makes up one’s interests. Readings include Annie Ernaux, Christina Sharpe, Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Renee Gladman, Dodie Bellamy, Nathalie Léger, Valeria Luiselli.

One day seminar as part of Triple Canopy’s annual Publication Intensive. We explored everyday archiving and personal research practices, looking towards publications that narrate the processes of their own making, and considered how the visual language of contemporary platforms and media shape, structure, and sequence those processes.

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A conversation about Are.na and the Are.na Annual at the event space ISLAND in Hamburg, followed by people presenting their Are.na channels. Put on with the Klasse Digitale Grafik Klasse at HFBK.

A five week writing workshop for graphic design undergraduate students, as part of the Currents elective course in Communications Design. At the close of the workshop, Caspar Lam, Lynne Yun and I edited a book of student writing about their experiments with AI during the workshops and published it through Library Stack.

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“Shimmer Around the Edges,” a lecture on writing images for graduate students in the Visual Culture seminar.

Guest critic for the final projects of students in David Reinfurt’s class on design research.

A seminar on digital publishing at Eesti Kunstiakadeemia for Masters graphic design students, co-taught with Julia Novitch, learning about the poetics and parameters of webzines. At the end of the course, we collectively created our own online publication: Shift.

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Part of the jury for the first graduating cohort of the EKA graphic design MA program

A conversation, organized and moderated with Are.na, for the Billion Seconds Institute series "Internet(s) of Everything" around the question of “How can we be generous with our curiosity online?” Participants were Mindy Seu, Shannon Mattern, and Dan Taeyoung, each of whom is very generous with their teaching, organizing, and presenting their interests online.

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For the 2020 AIGA Design Conference, I organized and led a session around environmentalism and design, featuring Benedetta Crippa, Jarrett Fuller, Julia Watson, Anoushka Khandwala, Joycelyn Longdon, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Jonny Black, and Scott Starrett.

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A lecture on design writing for the History of Graphic Design and Contemporary Graphic Design classes at the American College of Greece.

A talk on gossip and magazine making for the Amsterdam launch of the third issue of Eye on Design.

An intro and post-lecture interview with David Reinfurt on the life and work of Muriel Cooper.

For Laurel Schwulst’s “Writing as Metadata” class, I guest edited a student online publication called called The Life and Death of an Internet Onion.

Together with Maddy Morley, we spoke to Studio Pandan about their approach to editorial design, how they work together as a studio, and why they're compelled by magazine making as a medium.

A talk in Hamburg on editing Eye on Design and publishing as a generative act.

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A lecture and workshop on the beauty of simple, plainspoken language for thesis design students at Parsons.

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Visiting critic for thesis design students at Rutgers University during the fall semester 2018.