Avrie Allen
Interdisciplinary Designer + Educator in Providence, RI
avrie.world at gmail


About
As a graphic designer, I work with individuals and academic, cultural, and community institutions. Since 2016, I have offered pro bono design services to volunteer-run, grassroots organizations. Across self-driven and comissioned projects I'm interested in using design to facilitate critical inquiry into, and collective sense-making of, lived experience and the material conditions that shape it. My interdisciplinary, research-driven practice takes many forms engaging visual, written, and material language.
I am currently working on freelance web and publication design projects, designing for Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, teaching graphic design, and developing a publication titled countersense. Email is open for inquiries about projects, teaching, workshops, or to request my full CV.
This site is always handcoded. © 2026. All work licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Last updated 10.26.


CV
Selected Publications
Girlhood Arrested: How Girlhood is Shaped by the Carceral Landscape in Louisiana
Designer, Editor, Co-Authored with Dr. Kennedi Johnson and The Visiting Room Project, 2026
countersense
RISD MFA Thesis, 2026
girlhood & its aftermath: feminist reflections on adolescence Anthology
Designer, Editor, and Writer, Self-Published, 2023
Education
MFA, Graphic Design
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI
BFA, Studio Art—Graphic Design
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Minor–Art History
Para-Institutional Education
Typography Summer School
with Other Means, Geoff Han, Fraser Muggeridge, and Michael Bierut, Brooklyn, NYC
Teaching
Instructor, Graphic Design I
Community College of Rhode Island, FA 2026
Instructor, Activating Networks, Gathering Knowledge
Rhode Island School of Design, Wintersession 2026
Graduate Teaching Assistant, RISD Graphic Design Department
Rhode Island School of Design, SP 2025–SP 2026
Peer Tutor, Center for Arts & Language
Rhode Island School of Design, FA 2024–SP 2026
Facilitator, Girlhood Zine Workshop
The Visiting Room Project, July 2025
Grants, Awards, and Fellowships
Graduate Commons Grant
RISD, 2026
Maharam Fellowship
RISD, 2025
Graduate Fellowship
RISD Graphic Design, 2024–2026
Cox Scholar
Indiana University
Graphic Design Area Award
Indiana University
Grafton D. Trout Essay Award
Indiana University, Art History Department—Best paper of academic year
Solo Exhibition
girlhood redefined
Tangent Gallery, Bloomington, IN, 2024
Speaking
MFA Thesis Writing Workshop
RISD Graphic Design, Guest Panelist, Fall 2026
"Body of Knowledge," Graduate Artist Talk
Rhode Island School of Design, Winter 2026
Research
Karen Brodine Collection
Archival research of writings, notes, and works of poet, educator, typesetter, and political organizer Karen Brodine. San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA, 2026. Supported through the RISD Commons Grant. Associated with countersense, fragments of a future, and The houses, the air, the streets
Kinsey Institute Books and Magazines Collection
Primary research on norms of girlhood constructed through 20th century sex education home guides. Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN, 2023–24. Supported by Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute. Resulted in exhibition, girlhood redefined
RISD 150th Anniversary
Historical fact-finding on the past 150 years of RISD. RISD Marketing and Communications, Providence, RI, 2026
Project Index
Girlhood Arrested: How Girlhood is Shaped by the Carceral Landscape in Louisiana
2025
Sprial-Bound Book and Workshop
Designer, Co-Author, and Editor
with The Visiting Room Project and Dr. Kennedi Johnson

What began as a zine and self-publishing workshop with The Visiting Room Project (TVRP) developed into a 230-page book initiated by my collaborator Kennedi Johnson and me. Girlhood Arrested: How Girlhood is Shaped by the Carceral Landscape in Louisiana is a reflection on the Girlhood Zine Workshop we held, the possibilities of girlhood as an organizing construct of self outside of incarceration, and is a transhistorical engagement with the archival gaps of women’s lives and stories. It contains zine facsimiles and t-shirts by participants, essays, interviews, and archival material from the Louisiana state archives.
The design takes inspiration from disciplinary forms in prison. Throughout the book, text and images run over and outside of the gridded lines with no regard for attempts to fix or constrain—a conceptual move reflecting the formation of identity outside of the context of incarceration.

countersense
2025
Swiss-Bound Book and Presentation
Designer and Author

countersense my MFA thesis, is a culmination of my 2 years at RISD. It embodies a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making; it is a practice of opening up our present conditions for critical reflection and remaking. Viewing graphic design as an interdisciplinary and expansive field of meaning-making, countersense is the framework I perform between experience and ideology, self and material conditions—always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Read my introduction and bibliography on my in-progress site, www.countersense.world.
Or the full PDF on RISD Digital Commons.

everyday utopia
2025
Jacquard-Woven Textile
Designer
Collaboration with Jacob Marcus and Yik Heng Lee

everyday utopia is a jacquard-woven blanket inspired by A Decolonial Feminism by François Vergès. The blanket features interlaced text that is read from opposite directions: "utopia a radical promise" from one vertical orientation, and "the not yet here" on the other. Smaller action verbs and phrases spaced throughout the cloth prompt reflection on the question of liberation past, present, and future, a practice grounded in the body and within the everyday—not some far off or abstract future. Yik Heng interpreted the digital design by Jacob Marcus and me, indexing graphic pixels into woven structures and form, and created this collaboration. And it features body glyphs from Nat Pypers's Michiyo Fukaya font

On Measurement
2024
10 6x9" Double-Sided Prints
Designer and Researcher

How a culture views the body is historically and politically specific. Albrecht Dürer’s Instructions on Measurement, published in 1528, marks a transition for how the western body is represented—shifting from a metaphysical understanding to a rationalized subject. Over time, pursuit of bodily knowledge has become nearly indistinguishable from the pursuit and possibility of control. I use my own body to illustrate this logic at a 1:1 scale, and On Measurement considers the historicity of Dürer’s work and situates its representation within a lineage of technologies from 1528–today that aim to capture, measure, and analyze the body.

The End of History—History of the End
2025
Dos-á-Dos Book
Designer and Researcher

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, known for advising the Reagan administration, made the claim that we had reached “the end of history.” Seeing the waning power of the Soviet Union, according to Fukuyama, there were no longer any threats to the global rule of neoliberalism. The End of History–History of the End is a book of two timelines. Section 1, The End of History, documents key events contributing to the global dominance of neoliberalism. Importantly, it shows that this process was never destined, but achieved through coups, assassinations, and violent imposition. Section 2, History of the End, documents global acts of resistance to neoliberalism. It’s a collection of living proof that people want and are fighting for an alternative. Future alternatives have never been foreclosed; there has always been contingency and a desire for living otherwise.

RISD Graduate Studies Tote
2025
Designer

Commissioned by RISD Graduate Studies, I designed custom type utilizing forms I extracted from photos I took of RISD graduate studio and common spaces, like Fleet Library—creating a RISD visual vernacular.

RISD Graphic Design Triennial Site
2024
Website
Designer and Developer

I lead a small web design team, functioning as both primary designer and sole developer of the 2024 triennial site. The design translated the print and spatial identity to the web, and was developed conceptually under my lead. The dots on the homepage (links to individual works) randomize location, or "expire," with every refresh to reflect the curatorial direction

fragments of a future
2025
Poster and Video
Designer

fragments of a future is a response to Karen Brodine’s poem June, 78. In the poem, Brodine begins with embodiment to critique her experience living as a working class lesbian in 1978 San Francisco. June, 78 ends with the speculation of a future, one in which we and our communities are well. I worked by hand to layer and arrange each cutout into a large-scale poster. I recorded this and added a voiceover, the documentation becoming a performance of the poem. The mode of making becomes its content: an accumulation of fragments to construct something new.

Kinsey Institute
2022–2024
Designer

Selected infographics, social media graphics, and cover designs I created as graphic designer at the Kinsey Institute, a world-renowned research institute at Indiana University that studies sex, sexuality, gender, and reproduction.

The houses, the air, the streets
2025–2026
10 8.5x11" Silk Organza Prints
Designer

Sense permeates my work and is utilized as a means for understanding, critiquing, and responding to the environment I live in. The houses, the air, the streets is a prompt for others to do the same. The series of 10 silk organza prints reuses text from June, 78 by Karen Brodine, but the arrangement and meaning are open. The prints can be viewed together as a book—bound through grommets with binder rings—taken apart and viewed individually, or rearranged and clipped together horizontally—creating a modular, generative writing. With the transparent silk material, each print functions as a filter of the immediate environment. The prints offer a plane to make open-ended connections between color, personal association, and environmental context, prompted by the printed excerpts. These connections can be either critical or constructive between each print’s text contents and their spatial context;­ either a juxtaposition or a positive recognition.

An Empty Pedestal is an Invitation
2025
Website Design and Development, 2 Large-Format Prints, and Zines
Designer

Following protests and repeated vandalism of a Christopher Columbus statue in 2020, the city of Providence removed it from its pedestal in the Elmwood neighborhood. In 2023, the statue was gifted to the city of Johnston, Rhode Island, where it became a symbol of reactionary culture. Where local residents of Elmwood responded to the statue by criticizing the violent history it embodies, the statue in Johnston elicited white nationalist recruitment of residents. The responses of the two locations raise important questions, namely: Who can politicize Columbus? And to what ends? An Empty Pedestal is an Invitation politicizes the local history between the two locations and reframes the pedestal where Columbus once stood as an invitation to imagine otherwise.

girlhood redefined
2023–2024
Designer, Developer, and Researcher

girlhood redefined is a web archive and exhibition in partnership with the Kinsey Institute, and was shown in Tangent Gallery at Indiana University in 2024. girlhood redefined not only seeks to showcase the multiplicity of girlhood, but is an attempt to think through what it means to create knowledge and collective subjectivity from a feminist perspective. The project exemplifies the role that artists and designers, as creators and curators of knowledge, can have in this endeavor, and provides an example of how feminist methodologies relate to design practices. Girlhood is not limited to cis experiences or requires one to currently identify as a girl or woman.
My research at the Kinsey Institute focused on gender-based education guides within the collections from the early 1900s. These guides offered parents, specifically mothers, information on the morals and behaviors of an ideal girl. Such books had widespread influence as the primary resource for sex education at the time, and proliferated the ideological foundations of commonplace understanding of girlhood in the United States today. Unsurprisingly, the understandings of girlhood proposed within these books do not match how girls actually think about themselves. Nor do they account for the hardships and violence girls often experience. This project is a direct response to these education guides and allows girlhood to be defined from a bottom-up process, inspired by standpoint theory and other feminist epistemologies.
There is a multiplicity of ways one can experience girlhood, though commonalities tie our experiences together. Only by translating across the multiple ways of experiencing girlhood can feminists have a basis for the creation of more inclusive, uniting, and empowering knowledge of what it means to be a girl. This archive is just a first step.