I was Faculty and former Chair/Co-Chair of the MFA Program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2024.

The department is the United States’ first low-residency programs in graphic design that is built around a student’s individual interests and goals.

The MFA in Graphic Design is an immersive two-/three-year graduate program that synthesizes five/seven intense, one-week residencies with four/six six-month semesters of independent study with a range of faculty mentors.

The program educates students towards the broader context of design in order to investigate and reveal relationships. We see Graphic Design as a social tool and design education as a process of social transformation.

Initiatives I undertook at VCFA include helping to build out a world-class graphic design library, establishing an unsurpassed electronic library of graphic design essays spanning history, curating the department’s blog Perpetual Beta, and many of the program’s social media initiatives.

While Chair and Co-chair, I co-planned VCFA’s MFA in Graphic Design residencies with former Program Directors Jennifer Renko and Danielle Dahline, former Co-chair Silas Munro and former Co-Chair Dave Peacock.

We spearheaded NASAD accreditation, Guest Designer/Critic programming, created suggested reading lists, prepared thesis guidelines, book drives, print campaigns, oversaw applications, and innumerable other activities. We also led the program through its most meaningful growth period, bringing aboard dozens of new students, new faculty, all the while maintaining a highly visible presence at national conferences and in the media.

We also jointly created a three-year track MFA at VCFA.

Visit VCFA online here.

To put it bluntly, my former faculty colleagues at VCFA are some of the best design educators working today.

You will be hard-pressed to find a more intellectual, fun, and diverse group of design educators at other postgraduate institutions.

Imagine: learning from people who genuinely like each other and have your best interest as their goal.

Design at its very best should not be a mere mirror of culture—design should challenge society—to be better in an insightful, considered, and ultimately generative way.

VCFA’s goal is to do this outside of stylistic or conceptual constraints and to inspire students to develop their own paths—means and methods as considered and considerate as they are meaningful.

Working side-by-side with faculty and visiting designers, graphic design education can be both a force of social and personal change—something transformative to both culture and the individual.