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voice | valentina vergara
CONVERSATION WITH ELLEN LUPTON AND JENNIFER TOBIAS
VALENTINA VERGARA Freelance designer PRONOUNS She, her
Tell us about your education and background. I was born in Bogota but grew up in Miami. In 2014, I moved to New York to study at Pratt Institute. During senior year, when my best friend Farah and I were choosing our senior thesis professors, we noticed there were few women as options. We couldn’t shake the fact that our student body (which was around 75 percent female) was not reflected by our faculty. It was difficult to find a female mentor who could understand us and give us insight.
We started questioning everything. Why is this happening? Why are the people at the head of classrooms not reflective of the student body? Why, in our four years of design education, didn’t we learn about more people like us in our field? These questions uncovered hard truths,
and Led By Example was born. We worked closely with department chair Jessica Wexler, who became our mentor throughout the whole project.
Led By Example is a graphic design–focused campaign that rallies
for placing more women at the head of our classrooms and for includ- ing more women in the history of design. As part of the campaign, we organized an exhibition called Missing Pages, where we researched ten designers working from around 1900 to the present day. Our goal was
to educate ourselves, our peers, and our professors and ultimately to create the physical and metaphorical space for ourselves that had been missing throughout our education. For the exhibition, we printed our research on large pages that mimic pages scanned from our “missing textbook.” We also produced and held a panel discussion called “Against All Odds” with industry professionals, where we conducted a deep-dive conversation about diversity in our field.