Silas Munro

Profile

Silas Munro is an artist, designer, writer, and curator engaging multi-modal practices that inspire people to be the best versions of themselves in order to effect positive change on society as a whole. He earned his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.

He is the founder of Poly-Mode, the LGBTQ+ and Minority-owned design studio primarily working with cultural institutions and community-based organizations including collaborations with The City of LA, The Phillips Collection, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Housing Works, MoMA, MOCA, The New Museum, Walker Art Center, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and David Kordansky Gallery.

Munro’s research addresses the relationship between the designer’s personal identity, formal systems and strategies they utilize, and how both interact with the communities they serve. He is particularly interested in the often unaddressed post-colonial relationship between design and marginalized communities. He is the curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest which opened at Letterform Archive in 2022. Munro was a contributor to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and co-authored the forthcoming first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19–21st Century.

A seasoned and dedicated educator, Munro’s pedagogy focuses on image-making and typographic systems, expanded and inclusive design studies, our present experience of ecology, and novel formats of design pedagogy. He has been a critic and lecturer at leading programs including Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, NC State, RISD, and CalArts. Munro serves as faculty co-chair for the MFA Program in graphic design at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.