This lecture series invites new and established voices to share their stories, knowledge, and ideas with the community. This spring, we spotlight community-driven creative spaces and multidisciplinary design practices, highlighting how these groups foster collaboration, social impact, and cultural dialogue within their communities and beyond.

Join us as we explore the role of design in building and sustaining community, and how hybrid creative practices are shaping the future of creative work.

Type Electives Virtual Lecture Series:

Letra Muerta: Diseño, Archivo & Comunidad

After ten years of designing and publishing, Letra Muerta now functions as a hybrid studio for design, historical preservation, workshops, and collection development. Originally founded in 2014 as a publishing house in Venezuela, Letra Muerta opened as a physical space in New York City in 2022.

Projects are selected and developed with an emphasis on works in translation and multilingual content, with special attention to typography and cultural awareness. Archives are essential in design. Through archives, we set a foundation for our design practice, drawing from historical documents, materials, imagery, and narratives to contextualize and inform our visual language.

Letra Muerta’s reference library further enriches this practice, centering underrepresented voices, feminist activism, political resistance, and experimental design, providing a critical resource for reflection, research, and creative exploration.

Send us your questions through our Instagram @typeelectives

The event will be hosted online via Zoom.

We look forward to having you with us!

Faride Mereb

Venezuelan art director, book designer, and researcher living and working in New York City. She has won numerous awards, including the 2024 Grand Prix for best book design in the Latin American Design Awards, and best design studio (Venezuela). In 2022, she won a 10X10 research grant for work on photobooks by women, supporting her formative research on Karmele Leizaola (1929–2021), Venezuela’s first known woman graphic designer. Mereb was a visiting scholar at Columbia (2021–2022) and a guest professor at Yale (Fall 2024). She is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Printing History Association.

Oriana Nuzzi

Designer, born in Maracaibo, Venezuela; currently lives and works in New York City. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in design, graduating with honors from LUZ in 2019. In addition to taking courses on photography and visual arts, she participated in several group exhibitions, such as Cuerpo en cuestión (with Art Nexus) and Prácticas vs. teoréticas. In 2024, she was certified in “diseño y producción tipográfica” by the program developed by Tipografilia Estudios (Mexico City), and won second place in the Rafael Cadenas Poetry competition (Venezuela) the same year with her “Araya.” As part of her research on identity, she is currently developing a text typeface called Maracaibo.

Instagram: @letramuertainc, @fmereb, @orianamrgarita