2025 Art & Design Educator Award: Silas Munro 03 GD
Silas Munro is a designer, artist, writer, researcher, curator, surfer, and descendant of the Banyole people of Eastern Uganda. He is Founding Faculty, Chair Emeritus for the MFA Program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the 2024-25 Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. He has been a visiting critic or faculty at the Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, North Carolina State, RISD, OTIS, and CalArts, among others. His pedagogy focuses on image-making and typographic systems, expanded and inclusive design studies and histories, design’s relationship with ecology, and inventive formats for design education.
He founded the design studio Polymode, based in Los Angeles and Raleigh, NC, and works with clients across cultural spheres. His writing, curatorial work, and course design have advanced the study of BIPOC-centered design history, the graphic design of the African American diaspora, and typography as protest. Nominators cited Munro’s dedication to rigorous, inclusive design, his probing research, and the impact of his published and exhibited work, collaborations, and commissions on the field of graphic design and art and design education.
Munro’s research addresses the relationship between the designer’s identity, formal systems, strategies they utilize, and how all interact with the communities they serve. He is particularly interested in the often unaddressed post-colonial relationship between design and marginalized communities. His multidisciplinary art practice navigates the friction between painting, printmaking, and the analog materialization of abstraction, digital, and computational exploration.
The RISD Art & Design Educator Award recognizes alumni who demonstrate exceptional skills as an educator or a clear commitment to the field of art education, and are recognized by their peers and students as having shown those qualities that most encourage students to learn and thrive creatively.
Photo by Garrett Uhde, courtesy of Silas Munro.
