Design

Meta Newhouse is an award-winning creative director, graphic designer, and filmmaker with over 30­ years of experience in the visual communication industry. She has worked for clients such as The American Heart Association, Dallas County Community Colleges, Motorola, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Her work for those clients and others is published in 40+ professional design books and annuals, including Communication Arts, Graphis, PRINT, and NOVUM.

Meta has been a design educator since 1995 and most recently was the Founding Director of DSEL (The Design Sandbox for Engaged Learning) and Professor in Graphic Design at Montana State University. She is passionate about typography, guerrilla thinking, design entrepreneurship, environmental stewardship and human rights.

She has poster work about the dangerous effects of climate change added to the permanent collections of the V&A Museum (London); Les Arts Decoratifs de Paris; The Stedlijk Museum Breda (The Netherlands); the Lahti Poster Museum (Finland) and Designmuseum Danmark.

As a US Fulbright Scholar in 2020, she taught a graduate workshop in Guerrilla Design techniques in order to facilitate research dissemination at the University College Cork. Her book, Guerrilla Thinking for Designers, will be published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts and is slated to be available for sale in 2024.

Heather earned her MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and BFA in Visual Design from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her professional experience spans print, motion, and interactive media. Clients include MIT, Brandeis University, Perkins School for the Blind, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She also sits on the Advisory Board for AIGA Boston, The Professional Association for Design.

For over three decades, I have built bridges between graphic design, teaching and learning, and creating applications to support access, engagement and comprehension across the lifespan in schools of early to adult learning.

I am currently a professor of design at Lesley University College of Art and Design and critic at the Rhode Island School of Design in the department of Teaching and Learning in Art and Design Education. Currently, I am pursuing a Doctor of Education in Organizational Change and Leadership online at the University of Southern California, Rossier School of Education.

I have a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of the Arts, MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University, College of Art, and CAGS in Curriculum and Instruction from the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University.

Fisiha Likke is an artist, architect, and educator. Currently, he is an assistant professor of design at LA+D in Lesley University. He studied his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Illustration and Architecture, respectively. Following his undergraduate program, he served as an artist in residence for a non-profit organization and taught at various high schools in Rhode Island. He also held the position of head of the visual art department at MX High School in Concord, MA, before he joined his graduate studies. As a studio artist and muralist, he was commissioned and exhibited his works nationally and internationally.

Beyond his role as an educator, Likke actively engages in an architectural project that rebuilds schools in Ethiopia and participates in public design works in the Boston area. He recently joined the newly formed Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at Northeastern University.

B.ARCH / M.S.DESIGN

Shalini Prasad in an integrative designer practicing in the realm of graphic design, art and space. She brings a holistic thinking and approach to her work as a visual communicator and educator, that is rooted in an inter-disciplinary background in architecture, design, and art. Her aesthetic is characterized by spatial and graphic sensitivity, technical and structural rigor, an innate artistic fluidity, and a deep passion to connect and understand behavior and culture. Through her work she can transcend multiple platforms and balance the play of shape, image, line, texture and type, in both two dimensional and three-dimensional mediums.

Shalini Prasad began her formal creative journey with a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Delhi, India in 1999. After specializing as a residential architect for two years in Bangalore, she moved to the US where she received a Master’s Degree of Science in Visual Communication Design from the Herberger Institute of Design at Arizona State University, Tempe in 2003. She honed her professional skill as an in-house graphic designer in corporate/marketing communication firms and advertising agencies for 6 years while consulting as an environmental graphic designer, in both Saint Louis and New Jersey. Under DeSha Creative, Shalini started pursuing an independent direction and has been consulting since 2012 for single-business owners, nonprofit organizations, and design firms. Alongside her professional work, she is adjunct faculty at Lesley Art + Design where she teaches Typography and Visual Communication. She also creates mixed-media graphic art and has exhibited her work in galleries and exhibitions around New Jersey, Boston and New York.

She is delighted to share her creative repertoire as an independent consultant, educator, artist and empath and celebrate the power of an integrative thinking in design. She believes her extra-curricular training in the performing arts—theatre, singing and classical dance, helps her be a better teacher.

Rick Rawlins’s studio, Rick Rawlins/Work, is known for thoughtful publications that are produced with extraordinary care. Clients include: The Warren Buffett family, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Library of Congress, The Industrial Designers Society of America, The Jewish Heritage Museum, Chronicle Books, and The Cambridge Arts Council. Rick holds a BFA from Brigham Young University.

Bryan Rodrigues is a state certified professional teacher and a 2004 graduate of RISD/Fraunhofer International Certificate Program for New Media. He has been teaching graphic design and technology courses for the Rhode Island School of Design since 2001 and web and interaction design courses for Lesley University since 2016.

Rich has worked at Corey McPherson Nash where he designed and directed projects for The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, Harvard University, The Huntington Theater, and The Boston Pops. Rich Rose is a partner and creative director at PopKitchen Co. He and his design team conceive print and digital communications strategies for colleges and universities, nonprofit organizations, and major retailers. Some of PopKitchen's clients include Yale University, MIT, the ACLU, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Isaac Mizrahi, Paul McCartney, and Target. A graduate of RISD, Rich's work has won numerous awards from design publications and organizations such as Print, How, CASE, Communication Arts, and the BONE show. He's lectured on branding and identity design at conferences throughout New England and New York.