The Voices Behind Provoking Type
đ± Meet our Spring 2026 guest lecturers!
Provoking Type with Schessa Garbutt
Starting Tuesday, March 10th, 2026
Provoking Type is a 5-week course that invites participants to take a critical & decolonial lens to type and its role in history, culture, technology, power structures, and identity to explore and reimagine the narratives, contexts, and futures of type. Instructor Schessa Garbutt and guest lecturers offer their critical perspectives on type as a tool and medium, centering BIPOC and othered histories, research methods, and intellectual mirrors while examining classic eurocentric, patriarchal, and capitalist views of the craft. Applications are due Sunday, March 1st, 2026.
đ Apply Here
Announcing our Spring 2026 Guest Lecturers
Schessa Garbutt | Lead Instructor
Schessa Garbutt (they/them) is a Belizean-American creative polymath and founder of Firebrand Creative House based in Inglewood, CA. Their design practice focuses on brand identity and UI/UX design for social impact initiatives and mission-driven organizations. Garbutt is also an essayist (recently in The Black Experience in Design anthology) and lecturer, speaking on diversifying design history and co-design practices at universities and organizations such as IDEO, SF Design Week, MICA, Where are the Black Designers, and Adobeâs Wireframe podcast.
Beatriz Lozano | Guest Instructor
Beatriz (she/her) is a designer, typographer, and educator exploring how technology can push typography to exist at the intersection of the physical and digital world. She teaches interaction design at Parsons and was formerly a design director at Sunday Afternoon. Originally on the path to becoming a mechanical engineer, Beatriz shifted to graphic design as her involvement in immigrant rights activism exposed her to the power of visual communication. Her work has been recognized by the ADC, TDC, Communication arts, and PRINT. Some of her clients include ESPN, Target, and NPR.
Pouya Ahmadi | Guest Instructor
Pouya Ahmadi (he/him) is an Iranian-American designer, artist, and educator, and Associate Professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His research and practice explore the intertwined material and typographic manifestations of language and power through publishing, installations, and lecture-performances, with a focus on South West Asian articulations of modernity beyond Western/Euro-American stricture, examining hybridity, displaced bodies, and multivalent identities.
He is the founder of Studio Pouya Ahmadi and edits and designs Amalgam, an independent journal exploring typography, language, and power. He previously served as a guest editor and editorial board member of Neshan magazine from 2009â20.
AnalĂș MarĂa LĂłpez | Guest Instructor
AnalĂș MarĂa LĂłpez (Huachichil/XiâĂși) (she/her) is the Ayer librarian and assistant curator of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, where she stewards the Indigenous studies collection and guides users in connecting with and interpreting its materials. She is interested in the preservation, revitalization, and instruction of Indigenous languages, decolonial theory, and intentional community collaborations for access to materials within colonial institutions.
She has led hundreds of hands-on instructional sessions with rare books and other primary sources and co-curated exhibitions at the Newberry: âWhat is the Midwest?â in 2018 and âIndigenous Chicago,â in 2024 which she is also the co-Director of the âIndigenous Chicagoâ project, a multifaceted project exploring these histories, centering Indigenous voices, laying bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesturing toward Indigenous futures.
We canât wait to welcome this amazing lineup of instructors to our Spring 2026 cohort! đ± Share this post with your type-loving friends and help spread the word.
Kate