Jury Alumni

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  Silas Munro

  Partner, Polymode

  2022 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Silas Munro is a Partner of Polymode, a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design for clients in the cultural sphere. Collaborations include the City of LA Mayor’s Office, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Getty Museum, David Kordansky Gallery, Mark Bradford at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, and MOCA. Munro’s writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America featured in Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, and Black Perspectives. Munro expanded this research as a co-author of the first BIPOC centered Design History course: Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design, which will be published in book form in 2023. Munro holds an MFA from CalArts and a BFA from RISD. Munro is Founding Faculty and Co-Chair for the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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  Lotta Nieminen

  Founder, Lotta Nieminen Studio

  2016 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Lotta Nieminen is an illustrator, graphic designer and art director from Helsinki, Finland. She has studied graphic design and illustration at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Rhode Island School of Design, and has worked as a freelancer in both fields since 2006 before starting her Brooklyn-based studio in 2012.
  
  In 2014, she was nominated for Forbes magazine’s annual 30 Under 30 list in the Art & Style category. In 2010, she received the Art Directors Club Young Guns award and was selected by Print magazine for its annual New Visual Artists review, highlighting 20 international rising designers under the age of 30. Lotta has given talks around the US and Europe. Her client list includes companies such as Facebook, Hermès, Google, New York Times, Volkswagen, IBM, International Herald Tribune, Monocle, Newsweek, Wired, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg Businessweek.

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  Eddie Opara

  Partner-in-Charge, Creative Director, Pentagram

  2020 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Eddie Opara was born in London in 1972. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and Yale University. He began his career at ATG and Imaginary Forces and worked as senior designer-art director at 2×4 before establishing his own studio, The Map Office. He joined Pentagram’s New York office as partner in 2010. His projects have included the design of brand identity, publications, packaging, environments, exhibitions, interactive installations, websites, user interfaces and software, with many of his projects ranging across multiple media and clients including; lululemon, Samsung, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Nike, Grace Farms, the Menil Foundation, the Corcoran Group, Morgan Stanley, New York University, SHoP Architects, buroOS, Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), David Adjaye Associates and Princeton Architectural Press. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has appeared in publications such as Wired, Fast Company, Creative Review, Archis, Surface and Graphis. Opara is also a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art and has recently authored a book, Color Works, published by Rockport. He was named one of Adweek Creative 100 in 2018, one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2012 and 2014, and was featured in Ebony Magazine’s Power 100 list.

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  Selen Selviler Özüekren

  Co-Founder, Karbon

  2017 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Selen Selviler Ozuekren is the co-founder and creative director of Karbon Design Studio. She graduated as an architect from Istanbul Technical University in 1999. She was admitted to Istanbul Bilgi University Visual Communication Design graduate program. She worked at the same department as a teaching assistant. After receiving her MA degree in VCD, she was admitted to Pratt Institute Communication Design graduate program. She worked as an instructor at Istanbul Bilgi University, VCD between 2003-2009.
  
  Selen co-founded Karbon in 2005. Since then she's been working at Karbon as a designer and consultant. Karbon is a multi-disciplinary design studio providing creative solutions and consultancy in concept design, branding, communication design & strategy, architectural design and interior design. Karbon team is a hybrid combination of graphic designers, communication designers and architects. The company established a reputation through their work specifically in overall concept designs for café&restaurants, packaging design and branding. She is a member of GMK, Turkish Graphic Designers Association since 2006.

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  Mackey Saturday

  Principal, Mackey Saturday

  2016 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Responsible for some of today’s most ever-present identities-like those for Instagram, Oculus, and Affirm - Mackey has spent his career helping brands of all sizes become iconic through idea-driven strategy, elegantly simple design, and a relentless pursuit of enduring visual principles. After nearly a decade running his own studios in San Francisco and Denver, he became a Principal at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv—the design firm responsible for classic logos including NBC, National Geographic, and Chase Bank. He now runs his namesake studio based in Brooklyn, focused on creating impactful visual identities across an array of industries both locally and internationally.

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  Marvin Schwaibold

  Senior Design Lead, Squarespace

  2021 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Marvin Schwaibold is a Senior Design Lead at Squarespace where he is in charge of creating new design systems, creating prototypes and pushing the product forward. He focuses on interactive campaigns and new and interesting ways users will interact with the web on a global scale. He was previously a Art Director at Watson Design Group in Los Angeles working on interactive websites for clients like Wes Anderson, Disney,Netflix, IFC Films, Amazon Prime and Paramount Pictures.
  
  Marvins focus lies on the marriage of typography and interactive systems in the digital and print world. He strongly believes in the democratisation of good design on a larger scale.

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  Stewart Scott-Curran

  Executive Creative Director, Instrument

  2019 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Stewart is currently Executive Creative Director at Instrument, a digital and brand experience agency in Portland, Oregon. Prior to Instrument he was Director of Brand Design at Intercom in San Francisco where he built the Intercom Brand Studio from 3 to 22 people working across digital brand, content, events and everything in between. Stewart also has worked at CNN leading a redesign of their digital presence, at Coca-Cola where he led a rebrand of Sprite and at Nike where he worked for 10 years designing soccer uniforms for the best teams and athletes in the world. He is originally from Glasgow in Scotland.

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  Astrid Stavro

  Partner & Creative Director, Atlas

  2015 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Astrid Stavro graduated with a First Class Certificate from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and with Distinction from The Royal College of Art in London. In 2004 she returned to her native land of Spain to start her own design practice in Barcelona. Astrid Stavro's strongly rooted conceptual solutions and distinctive typographic approach quickly won international critical acclaim. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 150 highly acclaimed creative awards including D&AD, The Annual (Creative Review), Design Week Awards, The International Society of Typographic Designers and Art Directors Club of New York. She is a recurrent jury member in design competitions and lectures in design conferences worldwide. Stavro writes for various design journals and is currently the Art Director as well as a contributing editor of Elephant magazine.

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  Jennifer Sterling

  Founder & Creative Director, Jennifer Sterling Design

  2023 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Founder of Sterling Design in 1996, Jennifer is a creative director, designer, animator typographer, illustrator, photographer, and educator. Her work is part the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Museum Fur Kunst Und Gewerbe, Hamburg and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted a three-month solo show entitled "Jennifer Sterling: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design". The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museums Triennial Exhibit showcased the creative work of 83 designers and companies including Jennifer Sterling, Apple, Nike, and Martha Stewart.
  Her work has been featured in over 180 magazine and book articles, Graphis Magazine named her "One of the Top Ten Designers in the World." GD:USA Magazine named her one of the "Twelve Designers to Change Design into the Millennium". Clients and projects include creating an interactive online design to promote the worldwide distribution of aids awareness and medical distribution to third world countries for Yahoo Inc. as well as creating the worldwide brand "Vital Voices" for Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. In 2016 she created campaign collateral for Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign. Jennifer has served as an adjunct professor at CCA (the California College of the Arts / San Francisco), AAU (Academy of Art University / San Francisco) and SVA (School of Visual Arts / New York).
  

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  Kristy Tillman

  Head of Global Experience Design, Slack

  2019 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Kristy Tillman currently serves as the Head of Global Experience Design at Slack. As the first in the first in the role, she is building a vision and a team whose mission it is to lead the transformation of branded and built environments, workplace experience and culture, and their integrated services and programs through the use of design and technology to make Slack employees, partners and visitors’ lives more pleasant and productive.
  
  Prior to this role, Kristy lead and built Slack’s first Communication Design team, as the Head of Communication Design. Where was lead the design of Slack’s first user conference, marketing website’s first overhaul, and the creative direction of several brand marketing campaigns.
  
  Before Slack, Kristy was the Design Director at Society of Grownups— where she lead design teams dedicated to crafting exceptional experiences across both brand and product. She also worked as a designer at IDEO, an award-winning global design consultancy where she helped solve design problems across a variety of industries including consumer product goods, finance, education, and healthcare.
  
  Kristy believes in a future where design is a tool that aids underserved communities in solving sociocultural problems. As the co-founder of the Detroit Water Project and founder of Tomorrow Looks Bright, Kristy has a strong commitment to furthering the accessibility of design.
  
  She is an alumna of Florida A&M University.

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  Teal Triggs

  Associate Dean of the School of Communication, Royal College of Art

  2015 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Teal Triggs, is a Professor of Graphic Design and Associate Dean, School of Communication, Royal College of Art, London. As a graphic design historian, critic and educator she has lectured and broadcast widely and her writings have appeared in numerous edited books and international design publications. Her research has focused primarily on design pedagogy, self-publishing, and feminism. Teal is also Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Communication Design (Bloomsbury/ico-D) and co-editor of Visual Communication (Sage) and Associate Editor of Design Issues (MIT Press). She is currently co-editing a new book The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury). Her previous books include: Fanzines and, The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovations in Contemporary Type Design, both published by Thames & Hudson. She is a Fellow of the International Society of Typographic Designers, the Royal College of Art and the Royal Society of Arts.

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  Matt Willey

  Art Director, The New York Times Magazine

  2015 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Matt graduated from Central St Martins in 1997. Having gained valuable experience at a handful of small design companies he joined the internationally acclaimed studio Frost Design, later becoming Creative Director. In 2005 he co-founded Studio8 Design with Zod Bather. Matt is a co-founder of Port Magazine, which launched in February of 2011. In 2014 he was named Designer of the Year by Creative Review.He is currently the Art Director of The New York Times Magazine.