Interviews

Kellen Hatanaka is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto living and working in Stratford, Ontario. His vibrant, figurative work is centered around heritage, tradition, identity and representation. He has exhibited in Canada and internationally and created many public works. He has worked with a variety of clients including Nike, The Wall Street Journal, The Polaris Music Prize, Bruce Mau Design and Absolut Vodka. He was awarded the Governor General's Award in 2016 along with Jon-Erik Lappano for their book, "Tokyo Digs a Garden."

Tadas Karpavicius is an art director and graphic designer from Lithuania working in the fields of art, fashion, culture and commerce. Between self-initiated projects and commissions, he works with a variety of clients from different fields, maintaining a strong focus on the cultural sphere and collaborating with visual artists, designers, curators, galleries, institutions, commerce, businesses and individuals.

Johanne Lian Olsen is an internationally experienced graphic designer working within type design, editorial design and illustration. Additionally trained as a photographer, she focuses on both print and digital media. Her clients include such international brands as IKEA, NIKE, Whitechapel Gallery and Thames & Hudson Publishers.

Paw Poulsen is a graphic designer currently living and working in Copenhagen. He graduated from the Danish School of Media and Journalism in 2018 with an exchange at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. He co-founded together with Emil Hee and Jakob Slebsager Nielsen a publishing company called Amulet where they publish literary activistic literature. They have just released their first publication, Amulet Magasin 1.

Matthias Last is a designer & art director, founder of Studio Last and co-founder of Blake & Vargas, a project space and publishing house. Studio Last is an award-winning Berlin-based creative studio founded in 2012 and run by Matthias Last and partner Sarah Bernauer. With an explicit focus on details and materials, the studio works across a diverse range of platforms and disciplines, designing visual identities, books, magazines and websites - inventing and reviving them with a cutting edge, sleek elegance, and a hint of the unexpected.

Jessica Yatrofsky is a New York-based photographer, filmmaker and author, known for work exploring body politics, beauty, and gender. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design and published her first photography monograph, I Heart Boy, with powerHouse Books in 2010 and her sec-ond photography monograph, I Heart Girl, in 2015. In 2017, she published her debut collection of poetry titled Pink Privacy. Jessica’s photographic work is part of the permanent collection with the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Musem of Sex in New York City. Her photography work has been exhibited overseas and her film work has been both televised and screened at film festivals internationally. Jessica’s writing has also been featured in publications such as Forbes and New York Magazine.

Istanbul born artist Eylül Aslan has started with photography at an early age as a way to escape the patriarchal system she was born in. Having been introduced to feminism and human rights by her politician and activist mother, she took on photography to express herself and created a visual world of her own. Her art has taken her to Berlin, Germany where she continued to live and work for 5 years until recently when she finally moved to Vienna, Austria.

Aurélien Aumond is a French architecture photographer based in Lyon, France, interested in spaces, lines, lights, shadows, tones, and textures. We caught up with Aurélien to talk about photography, architecture, creativity, and living and working in Lyon.

Stephanie Specht is a freelance graphic designer and founder of Specht Studio, based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her style is best described as design that touches both the rational and organic field. The rational field is the knowledge that her education provided her. The organic field is the luggage that life gave her. When those two fields overlap each other in a design, it creates a special visual balance.

Martin Vácha founded the small independent type-foundry Displaay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2016. He studied graphic design at The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He worked as a graphic designer at Studio Najbrt for 8 years, and decided to quit a year ago because his passion for observing typefaces and creating new shapes ate him up completely. He is now focusing on developing typefaces and often collaborates with a wide range of design studios.

Violaine & Jérémy is a Paris based illustration and graphic arts studio founded by Jérémy Schneider and Violaine Orsoni. Their main focus is on illustration, typography, graphic design, art direction, and visual identity. We caught up with the french couple to talk about design, creativity and living and working in the city.

République Studio is an award-winning creative direction and graphic design practice based in Paris. They work with local and international clients across a diverse range of platforms and disciplines, designing brand identities, signage, publications, magazines, posters and websites. We caught up with Tom Uferas, founder and creative director of République Studio to talk about design, creativity, and living and working in Paris.

Clara Claus is a multidisciplinary artist from France, she studied Spatial Design at Duperré (Paris) and holds a BFA from The Cooper Union (NY). She has exhibited her work internationally in cities like Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona in the form of solo exhibitions and performances. She has also collaborated with musicians such as Bryce Dessner (The National), Sufjan Stevens and Joakim, and filmmakers Margarita Jimeno and Derrick Belcham.

Io Makandal is an interdisciplinary artist based in Johannesburg. Her work explores binaries between artifice/nature, chaos/order, utopia/dystopia real/imaginary spatialities during the Anthropocene. She is also intrigued by how human and non-human beings are evolving in hybrid environments.

Matthias Brown is an artist and animator living and working in Jersey City, NJ. He has a BFA in graphic design from SCAD Atlanta and is the creator of TraceLoops - an animation experiment centered around hand-drawn, physical animations and experiments with the creation and perception of motion. TraceLoops has been used by a variety of brands including Converse, NBC, Hyundai, MTV, CNN, The Tate Modern, Ghostly International, and many others.

Vrints-Kolsteren is an Antwerp based design studio led by Vincent Vrints and Naomi Kolsteren. They work locally and internationally and offer creative direction, photography and graphic design. They engage in ongoing partnerships and are creating a network of creative talent by working in a collaborative way. Recent commissions include creative direction for Arte Antwerp, ongoing photography for Knack Weekend , visual identity for the Antwerp Art Weekend and The Night of The Visual Arts, as well as the exposition design and catalogue for Mol Kiest Kunst. We caught up with Naomi and Vincent to talk about design, creativity, and living and working in Antwerp.

Morey Talmor is a graphic designer and creative director originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, currently living and working in New York. He is the founder of Talmor & Talmor & Talmor a creative consultancy and design agency based in New York, creating work that spans multiple disciplines including branding, creative direction, design for digital platforms, editorial, packaging, and content creation.

Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer cultural, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dancer floor, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Carolin Wanitzek is an independent artist, scenographer and set designer based in Mannheim/Germany specialising in handcrafted illustrations, window displays and stop-motion props. She designs three-dimensional installations using a variety of materials. Working in the field of scenography she blends graphic design, set design and photography to develop concepts for extraordinary worlds. Her work has been published in digital media, magazines and catalogues. Currently she is working for national and international clients, such as Hewlett-Packard, Vodafone, Spiegel Verlag and the BASF and she is a partner at OUI R Creative Studio.

Amber Vittoria is an illustrator focusing on femininity and the female form, leveraging physical traits such as body hair, overtly extended limbs, and rounded features. Her work has been recognized by Print Magazine‘s 2017 New Visual Artists – 15 Under 30, It’s Nice That, Computer Arts, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller, and 20×200. She has collaborated with brands, such as Gucci, The New York Times, and Instagram.

Sydney based Artist & Designer Kris Andrew Small’s idiosyncratic collection of work ranges from lucid abstract pieces & photo-based collages, to fervent textural pieces and kinetic type based works. Kris’ work is often reminiscent of the colour and flamboyance of his childhood, growing up in the 90s in a tropical part of Australia. These early influences are clear across Kris’ portfolio and help to connect the dots and to define his energetic aesthetic.

Ethan Caflisch is an Oakland based artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, art direction and design. Across all disciplines, his work explores the beauty of raw materials and is personified by bold linear and organic forms, interspersed by a graphic use of color. His arts education began at the California College of the Arts, where he graduated with an Individualized Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Visual Studies Minor in 2015. His work has been exhibited in many esteemed institutions such as Petzel Gallery in New York, Hubbell Street Galleries in San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Charlotte Strick is a principal at the multidisciplinary graphic design firm, Strick&Williams, founded in 2014 with her longtime friend and colleague, Claire Williams Martinez. The studio collaborates with cultural institutions and clients in the arts, publishing, education, non-profits and everything in-between. For 14 years prior, Strick was a designer turned art director at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where she designed book covers for much-loved authors like Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Bolaño, and Lydia Davis. Her work has been featured in the AIGA 50 Books / 50 Covers show, the TDC Annual Exhibition, Print Magazine, and in many books about cover design. The proud owner of a coveted Silver Cube from The Art Directors Club, Charlotte is also Art Editor of the distinguished literary magazine, “The Paris Review”.

Sean Pecknold is a film director and stop-motion artist who has created music videos and commercials for the likes of Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, BBC and the New York Times. He explores existential conundrums in his work, often using mystical or surreal imagery and stop-motion and mixed-media animation. On the road is where he feels the most at home. He grew up in Seattle, spent some time living in New York, and now lives in Los Angeles. He runs Sing-Sing studio in Los Angeles with Adi Goodrich.