College of Fine Arts community members are invited to join this 90 min. talk and Q&A with designer and artist, Paul Soulellis. Presented by the Department of Design.
Survival by Sharing
Why does design matter today? What kind of typography emerges from liberated language? Is graphic design even relevant anymore? These are some of the questions Paul Soulellis continues to explore in his practice, which focuses on past (and future) movements toward liberation and how they persist across time and space to spread the word.
In this talk, Soulellis shares his journey as an artist and designer, using time travel to explore the research that keeps him inspired. He’ll examine how concepts like collectivity, unlearning, and failure might help us think about the future of graphic design. Survival by Sharing is about bad archives, queer typography, print culture, zines, illegibility, AI, and experimental publishing—how they can be used as urgent tools for empowerment, and how you might use them to create your own survival networks with the people and issues that matter most.
• Thursday, March 6th – 90 min. talk + Q&A
• Friday, March 7th – Workshop (details and registration link available soon)
About the Artist
Paul Soulellis is an artist and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. His practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies, network culture, and archival justice. He is the founder of Queer.Archive.Work, a non-profit project that supports artists with access to studio space, tools, and other resources for queer publishing. His writing has been published by The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Rhizome, MIT Press, Dispersed Holdings, Genderfail, and many others, and his book Queer Typographies is forthcoming from Bikini Books in fall 2026. He is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design.
See more of his work at: www.soulellis.com