Joi T. Arcand is an artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory, currently residing in Ottawa, Ontario. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with Great Distinction from the University of Saskatchewan in 2005. In 2018, Arcand was shortlisted for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. Her practice includes photography, digital collage, and graphic design and is characterized by a visionary and subversive reclamation and indigenization of public spaces through the use of Cree language and syllabics.
With a Bachelors of Fine Arts (major in Graphic Design) from the University of Québec, Sébastien Aubin has worked for Kolegram, one of the most prestigious graphic design studios in Québec, and has since shaped his professional career as a freelance graphic artist. Aubin has done publications for numerous artists, organizations and art galleries in Winnipeg, Montréal and Ottawa, including Plug In ICA Close Encounters, the next 500 years, Terrance Houle, KC Adams, Carleton University Art Gallery, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba. Aubin is one of the founding members of the ITWÉ collective that is dedicated to research, creation, production and education of Aboriginal digital culture. Currently based in Montréal, QC, Sébastien Aubin is a proud member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba.
Kaylene J. Big Knife is from the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation located in northcentral Montana. She is a graphic designer and a digital illustrator with a love for comic art and storybooks. Big Knife’s educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in Native American Studies from the University of Montana – Missoula and a master’s degree in Native American Languages and Linguistics from the University of Arizona. Big Knife has since returned home and is currently self-employed and growing her art business, Kay Big Knife Design. Her life passions and creative interests include: Indigenous language revitalization, pop
culture, humor, comics, museums, floral motifs, video games, fiction writing, glitter and iridescent art mediums, and cats.
Kevin Coochwytewa Design. Award-winning Native American graphic designer providing effective creative solutions from an Indigenous perspective.
Sebastian EbarbChoctaw-Apache
Insta: sebastianebarb
Sebastian Ellington Flying Eagle Ebarb is a designer based in Boston. A member of the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb, he has spent his years working to revive, hold and revere all of his heritage. He is the co-owner of the design studio Nahi (meaning “we” in Apache)" and an Associate Teaching Professor in Design at Northeastern University.
Menaja Ganesh is a Tamil artist from bengal, currently based in San Francisco. their work lies at the intersections between language and presentation, queerness and femininity, familiarity and loss. Their creative process is rooted in ceremony, fully engaging the body and space2 through the practices of printmaking, spacial installation, and performance. they are deeply nourished by Maa Kali, Maa Parvati, and Maa Durga, by homecooked dinners and offerings, by the scent of jasmine (no matter how faint), by their mother’s silver jewelry and their grandmothers' sarees. they believe that they cannot be separated from the history of the lands that raised them, and are honoured to carry forth that legacy through their work, collaborations, and learnings.
Jessica Moore Harjo, Ph.D., Weomepe, is an artist, designer, and educator based in Oklahoma. Jessica’s approach to art and design is unique, post-traditional, and grounded in cultural symbolism. Her research interests are in design and typography as well as intersections of cultural and visual representation affecting social awareness and identity.
Whess Harman is an artist and curator based in what is colonially known as Vancouver, British Columbia. They are perhaps most known for their beading and zine work, including their Potlach Punk series and their Together Apart Zine series.
John Hudson is co-founder of Tiro Typeworks, a digital font foundry specialising in custom types for multilingual publishing and computing. In a 25 year career, he has designed or collaborated on numerous typefaces for the Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Javanese, Kannada, Odia, Sinhala, Telugu, and Thai scripts. He is a contributor to the Unicode Standard, the W3C Webfonts Working Group, and the OpenType variations and layout working groups, and former vice-president of the Association Typographique Internationale.
Mark Jamra is a type designer and former professor of graphic design, who has designed and produced typefaces for four decades. He is the founder of TypeCulture, an online type foundry and academic resource, and is a founding partner of JamraPatel, a studio creating innovative type systems with multiple scripts for use in under-supported language communities. Mark has taught letterform and type design at colleges and in workshops in the U.S. and Germany. His typefaces have received recognition from the TDC and the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI).
Kevin King is a typeface designer, typographer, calligrapher, and type researcher based in Canada. After working at Toronto’s Coach House Press and Canada Type, he completed his Master’s degree in Typeface Design with distinction at the University of Reading in 2018. His work focuses on font support and research for minority languages, working directly with Indigenous communities in North America to support their language revitalization and preservation efforts. Through his work collaborating with Typotheque, he has contributed to reforming the text standardisation for the Unified Canadian Syllabics in the Unicode Standard through character additions and representative glyph revisions. In conjunction with his type design work, he maintains a calligraphy practice, teaching workshops and lecturing on both subjects in Canada and Europe.
I was born and raised in Window Rock, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. Heightened by a culture of meaning devoid of decoration and unnecessary components. Applying the subtleties of visual storytelling to typography has been a driving factor in my creativity. I believe the ordering and presentation of information is a key component to bettering our lives from the perspective of both the user and distributor. I am a spatial thinker, and can abstract conceptual components into strong graphical elements. It is my mission to bridge my ancestral art and understanding with modern design applications.
Ya’at’eeh. Digital Navajo is multidisciplinary design and branding studio owned and operated by Victor Pascual, Navajo + Maya, and is currently based in Albuquerque, NM. Our general experience spans 19 years, working with Indian-owned businesses–large and small, Indian-led foundations and non-profits, and tribal governments and nations.
Neil Patel is a type designer and former semiconductor process engineer based in Portland, Maine. He is the founder of Tetradtype, an independent type foundry, and a founding partner of JamraPatel, a studio which focuses on typefaces, keyboards and apps for indigenous scripts. Neil’s collaborative logotype designs with local studios have been featured in How Magazine and Comm Arts. He has also been known to dabble with programming, which he ties back into his design practice.
Sadie Red Wing (sadieredwing.com) is a Lakota graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Nation of Fort Totten, North Dakota. Red Wing earned her BFA in New Media Arts and Interactive Design at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University. Her research on cultural revitalization through design tools and strategies created a new demand for tribal competence in graphic design research. Red Wing urges Native American graphic designers to express visual sovereignty in their design work, as well as, encourages academia to include an indigenous perspective in design curriculum. Currently, Red Wing serves as an Assistant Professor at OCAD University (Toronto, ONT).
Rainer Erich (‘Eric’) Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna, and studied photography, philosophy and Dutch. Today, he creates and produces typefaces, gives type design workshops, translates Dutch books on typography into German, and writes articles and Python scripts. He joined the Glyphs team in 2012, and has been writing tutorials and the handbook ever since.
Brian SkeetDiné Bikéyah
Insta: brianskeetdesign
Brian Skeet is an Indigenous (Diné - Navajo) designer born in Tuba City, Arizona and raised on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Skeet is a multidisciplinary designer that strives to cultivate Indigenous initiatives through Design, Research, Technology, and innovation. Strategically, Skeet's work focuses on energizing future Indigenous creatives to illuminate systemic issues and cultivate culturally centered solutions with Indigenous communities. Skeet holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design, Design Management, and Graphic Design.
Chris SkillernCherokee Nation
Insta: tulseytype
Chris Skillern is a type designer and citizen of the Cherokee Nation from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Chris traces his love of drawing letters back to his childhood spent cartooning and, later, to his involvement in Tulsa's punk rock and underground music scene, making flyers and posters for his band and others. As a member of the 2021 graduating class from Type West, the Letterform Archive's postgraduate certificate program in type design, his final project was a type family consisting of three styles meant for children’s books that supports both the Latin alphabet and the Cherokee syllabary. Chris has a special interest in working with the syllabary and plans to pursue it further with the launch of his foundry, Tulsey Type.
Christopher Sleboda is a graphic designer, curator, and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Art, Graphic Design at Boston University and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. From 2005 to 2020, he served as director of graphic design at the Yale University Art Gallery, overseeing the graphic design and way finding for the museum. He recently curated the Multiple Formats Contemporary Art Book Symposium, and is the co-founder of Draw Down Books and the illustration studio Gluekit. His work is featured in more than a dozen books about graphic design and illustration, and he is the author of three monographs.
Kathleen SlebodaNlaka’pamux
Insta: newlyformed_official
Kathleen Sleboda is an art director, graphic designer, educator, and illustrator. Her work crosses disciplines, weaving together the acts of making, curating, collaborating, and documenting. She is co-founder and design director of Draw Down Books and principal of the illustration studio Gluekit. For the past 15 years, she has designed books and printed materials for cultural institutions while lecturing and writing about graphic design, independent publishing, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the preservation of cultural heritage. She currently teaches graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from San Francisco, she graduated from Yale University and the University of British Columbia. Kathleen is Nlaka’pamux and a member of the Coldwater Indian Band of Merritt, British Columbia.
Bobby Joe Smith III is a Black and Lakota (Hunkpapa and Oohenumpa) graphic designer and media artist. Design, computation, performance, writing, and lens-based image-making are mediums of expression and inquiry he turns to often. His creative practice is rooted in the ongoing decolonial and abolitionist movements led by Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and across the Black diaspora. His research draws from the decolonial, abolitionist, and post-apocalyptic strategies of Black and Indigenous people to construct a poetic vernacular of "unsettling grammars"—gestures, methodologies, and utterances that deviate, disrupt, and dismantle settler-colonial systems. By rearticulating these "unsettling grammars" through the disciplines of media art and design, Bobby Joe seeks to reveal vectors leading toward decolonial futures and generate work that resonates with the people and movements he is from. He holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a Post-Baccalaureate degree in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Middlebury College.
Neebinnaukzhik SouthallChippewas of Rama First Nation
Web: neebin.com
Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Chippewas of Rama First Nation), is a graphic designer, artist, photographer, and writer who specializes in working within Indigenous communities.
Leo Vicenti is an enrolled member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. He identifies creatively as a human, an artist, educator and visual communication designer, which informs his making.