Docent Program

Javier Alcaraz (he/him) is an editorial designer and typesetter born in Argentina, professionally raised in Mexico, and established in Spain in 2020. He teaches Book Design at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and leads his design studio with a strong interest in reading experience. Javier has been a typographic enthusiast since studied Graphic Design. After resettling to Mexico City, he discovered his true passion by enrolling in the Type Design Master program in Veracruz. He pursued this interest by completing a seminar at the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp, Belgium. Curiosity regarding the graphical representation of languages moves him to seek clues about creating aesthetics.

Gives tours in: English, Spanish, Catalan

Dina Benbrahim (she/her) is a Moroccan multidisciplinary creative, organizer, educator, and researcher who uses an intersectional feminist lens to dissent and investigate design for visibility, civic action, and social justice with minoritized communities to collectively reimagine equitable futures. She is currently an Endowed Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Arkansas and the founder and director of Hello Departures, an ever-evolving experimental program at the intersection of design pedagogy, strategy, and community that provokes uplifting transformative possibilities. In addition, she volunteers to officiate weddings for the LGBTQAI2S+/FLINTA community.

Gives tours in: English, French, Moroccan Arabic

Tran Bui (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer who is passionate about words, images, and meaning-making. She love the process of meaning-making from words and images. Sometimes, Tran is serious about artworks because design is a tool to reflect on them. Other times, she just explores and have fun with the elements.

Gives tours in: English, Vietnamese

Tanya George (she/her) is a Mumbai-based designer and educator with a wide-ranging freelance practice that includes designing letterforms for brand identities as well as fonts, across different Indian scripts. She also conducts type walks around Mumbai, along with type based workshops, and writes about type.

Gives tours in: English, Hindi

Sidharth Jaishankar (he/him) is a type and graphic designer originally from Chennai, India. Having started reading at a young age, he has wanted to be a writer for as long as he can remember, but somehow got distracted by the design of the books he was reading. He now aims to balance both interests, using writing and research to study the intersection of design with books, language, and culture. He enjoys designing systems, including typefaces, publications, identities, and interfaces. He also likes exploring printing techniques and coding, and holds out hope of writing an epic fantasy novel at some point.

Gives tours in: English, Tamil

Ji Woo Kim (he/they) is a designer and lifelong learner. His interest revolves around the intersection of typography and language, delving into ancestral history and weaving together past and present to imagine alternative history.

Gives tours in: English, Korean

Melissa Lee (she/her) delights in learning and exploring alongside Archive guests to see where their curiosity leads. She is a graphic designer focusing on the needs of nonprofits and educational institutions and is particularly interested in improving accessibility. Before circling back to design, she painted sets for the theatre, roamed the South while building homes and doing disaster recovery work, and tried to convince skeptical middle school students that art and math are intertwined. She enjoys the outdoors and drawing letterforms onto vintage postcards for friends and family.

Gives tours in: English

JiaJing Liu (she/her) is a writer and communications consultant based in San Francisco. Her love for printed matter started with childhood visits to the Beilin Museum, the storied repository of stelae calligraphy in Xi’an, China. In college, she studied the history of printing, participating in hands-on workshops to make papyrus and illuminate manuscripts. She has since worked as a translator specializing in contemporary Chinese art.

Gives tours in: English, Mandarin, French

Henrique Nardi (he/him) is a graphic designer, photographer, and typography educator from São Paulo, Brazil. In 2003 Henrique started Tipocracia, an educational project to promote typographic culture in Brazil. He organized and hosted over a dozen conferences on type and design. Former director of ADG Brasil (2011–2013), the Brazilian Graphic Designers Association. In 2015, he served as chair/member of the ATypI São Paulo organizing committee. He taught Graphic, Editorial, and Typeface Design for seven years at the University of Wisconsin. While in Madison, he engaged in a handful of mural projects. In 2023, Henrique joined ATypI’s board of directors and moved to Augusta, Georgia, to take on an Assistant Professor position at Augusta University’s Department of Art & Design.

Gives tours in: English, Portuguese

Christina Newhard (she/her) is designer, writer, publisher, and full-time servant to her cat, Princess Genghis. She earned her BFA from the University of Florida in 1996, and has been a designer and type nerd ever since. Her past clients include the Smithsonian Institute, The “me too.” Movement, Penguin Random House, the New Press, Democracy for the Arab World Now, and NYU. In 2012, she founded Sari-Sari Storybooks, a press devoted to Filipino picture books, and has published five titles in underrepresented Philippine languages. Christina hails from Manila, Florida, New York City, and Oakland, in that order. She is most at home in a city by the water.

Gives tours in: English

Rebecca Pietri (she/her) excels as a dynamic docent, skillfully blending creative ingenuity and visual strategy expertise across fashion, art, and entertainment. With a notable career spanning decades and recognized achievements, she’s established herself as a reliable expert, adept creator, and collaborative force. Rebecca’s curation seamlessly merges physical and intellectual elements, yielding fresh perspectives that connect history with innovative possibilities, delving into the transformative realms of Lettering, Typography, Printmaking, and Graphic Design

Gives tours in: English

Leslie Rueda (she/her) is a Latine artist from the Bay Area. Through design and printmaking, she explores her own culture, queerness, and existence. She earned her BFA in Graphic Design and now currently helps make cool things at a print studio in Oakland.

Gives tours in:English, Spanish

Milosh Sokolikj (he/him) is a service designer working in the field of social innovation, where he focuses on making innovation processes user-centred and participatory. He also collaborates with non-profits to design branding, print and digital communications that help them share their message and connect with audiences. He loves type because it lies at the intersection of some of his favourite things – design, language, and books, and he looks forward to sharing this excitement with others as a docent at the Letterform Archive.

Gives tours in: English, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, French

Cooper Sullivan-Marcus (they/them) has been enamored with hand lettering since their first calligraphy lesson at Reed College, where they earned a BA in Physics. They were raised in San Francisco by two librarian parents, who instilled a love of everything a library has to offer at a young age. Now a practicing calligrapher, their work is informed by the careful study of historic letterforms and techniques.

Gives tours in: English

Laura Tjho (she/her) is a designer and illustrator. Since elementary school she took great pleasure in making sure her class notes look neat and beautiful. After graduating from design school at Carnegie Mellon, she reawakened that desire to make pretty letterforms and spent most of her free time lettering and practicing calligraphy. She had several tech start-up gigs before landing a sweet job at Levi’s San Francisco. She is currently exploring Hanzi letterforms and curious how that will influence her other work. Her latest hobby is making cute stickers because she believes we need more stationary.

Gives tours in: English, Mandarin

Carine Vadet-Perrot (she/her) is a type and graphic designer in Brittany, France. She views letters as a means to connect people and type design as an endless game.
For her, delving into an archive is like traveling through space and time, offering the opportunity to witness genuine vintage items and create a connection between the past and present. This exploration allows us to get a better understanding of the roots of our contemporary world and to imagine new paths. Always ready to embark to new adventures in the letter world, she enjoys expanding her horizons and seeking to understand what at first may look unfamiliar or disconcerting.

Gives tours in: English, French