This year, AIGA Rhode Island will be putting on the first ever KnowHER Design Talks. This series celebrates and highlights the strong female powerhouses who make up our design industry. Every Thursday throughout the month of March, one female designer will give a presentation on her work and her experiences. 

We want to expose all designers to the influential and inspiring female graphic designers in our creative community. 

Panel includes:
Juliette Cezzar, Designer & Assistant Professor at Parsons
Ashleigh Axios, Creative Director for the White House
Nancy Skolos, Designer & Professor at RISD
Dr. Nadine Chahine, Monotype's UK Type Director

Debbie Millman is a world renowned writer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the radio show Design Matters. Design Matters (www. debbiemillman.com/designmatters/) is the world’s first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought.
Brand Thinking by Debbie Millman

Juliette Cezzar is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design program at Parsons / The New School, where she was the Director of the BFA Communication Design and BFA Design & Technology programs from 2011–2014. She established her small studio, e.a.d., in 2005. While books anchor the practice, her work has spanned a variety of media for clients such as Tartine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, RES Magazine, The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Times, Eleven Madison Park, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is the co-author of Designing the Editorial Experience (Rockport) and authordesigner of Office Mayhem (Abrams), Paper Pilot, Paper Captain, and Paper Astronaut (Universe / Rizzoli). She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and a professional degree (B. Arch) in Architecture from Virginia Tech. She is the president of the board of directors at AIGA/NY.

Ashleigh Axios, the Creative Director for the White House, leads and manages design for the White House and WhiteHouse.gov from within the Office of Digital Strategy. Before taking a position as the Creative Director, Axios spent two years as an Art Director for the Office of Digital Strategy. Ashleigh served for upwards of four years as an executive board member for AIGA DC, the DC chapter the professional association for design. Ashleigh previously worked as the manager of online editorial and engagement for the National Wildlife Federation. Prior to that, she designed interactive museum exhibits with Cortina Productions, notably helping The Henry Ford launch their Driving America permanent museum exhibit on the influence of the automobile on American culture. Ashleigh has also worked as a graphic designer for openbox9, Fleishman–Hillard, and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Born in Northern Virginia and raised in New Jersey, Ashleigh received a BFA in Graphic Design from RISD.

Nancy Skolos, a native of Ohio, began her college career in design at The University of Cincinnati in industrial design. After two years of study, she was accepted as one of a few undergraduate students at Cranbrook Academy of Art where she completed her BFA in interdisciplinary design, and then went directly to Yale and received an MFA in graphic design. Within a year of graduation, she started a practice with her husband, Tom Wedell, whom she met at Cranbrook. Their early projects developed a visual vocabulary with a complexity of structure and color that reflected the hightechnology and consumer electronics clients they had in Boston such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Boston Acoustics. Over the years they have worked at the boundaries of graphic design and photography, creating collaged, illusory images influenced by modern painting and architecture. In 1983 Nancy won an Award in Progressive Architecture’s Conceptual Furniture Competition and in the late 1980s Skolos-Wedell’s work was featured in the book New American Design. Nancy began teaching at RISD in the late 1980s and was appointed to the full-time faculty in 1999. In 1998 she became an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and in 2003 she was named an AIGA Fellow. Skolos has won many awards with her husband including Silver Prize in Toyama and Bronze Prize in Lahti Poster Biennials.

Dr. Nadine Chahine is the UK Type Director and Legibility Expert at Monotype, where she plays a key role in the design and development of new typefaces, in addition to research focused on various relationships between typefaces and legibility. A native of Lebanon, Nadine’s special interest in Arabic typography is at the heart of the many typefaces she’s designed, including the Frutiger Arabic, Palatino Arabic, Zapfino Arabic, Koufiya, Janna, Badiya and BigVesta Arabic designs. Nadine studied Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut and received a master’s degree from the prestigious MA Typeface Design program at the University of Reading, UK. In 2012, she earned a Ph.D. from Leiden University in The Netherlands, where she focused on eye movement and legibility studies for the Arabic, Latin and Chinese scripts. Nadine has won numerous typeface design awards, and her work has been featured in the 5th edition of Megg's History of Graphic Design. In 2012, Nadine was selected by Fast Company as one of its “100 Most Creative People in Business” and again in 2014 as one of the publication’s “Most Creative People in Business 1000."

Advance Tickets:
$15 AIGA Members
$20 Non-Members
$10 Students (must show proof of purchase & valid ID)

ALL Tickets bought at the door ARE $20 (students included)