Jessica D'Elena: Graphitecture: The Graphic Designer Draws Lines in the Architect's Sandbox

04.03.09 | W. M. Keck Lecture Hall l 1pm Jessica D'Elena is a Los Angeles-based graphic designer whose interest, study and practice is in the areas of publication, exhibition and environmental design, of which she has received recognition for from the Art Director's Club. She received her BFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999, and her MFA in Graphic Design from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007. It was at CalArts where she formed one of the central themes behind her work, in a graduate thesis titled "HY/SY/SYN: The Graphic Designer is a 21st Century Architect & The Proclamation of Graphitecture"; in this work she seeks to define a greater synthesis between graphic design platforms and architectural bodies, using the metaphor of posthuman phenomenology. The work aims to demonstrate how this synthesis can live physically in the real world as part of actual living structures rather than just virtual data. The project will be featured in the upcoming design textbook, "Motion Graphic Design: Applied History and Aesthetics" scheduled for publication by Focal Press in January, 2008. She recently completed collaborating with Lorraine Wild of Green Dragon Office on the fifth installment of the Morphosis monographs, has instructed graphic design history at Art Center, and is now the primary graphic design specialist for Morphosis Architects. Sci-Arc Lectures