Silas Munro

Silas Munro is the founder and a partner of Polymode, a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design through poetic research, learning experiences, and making cool shit for clients in the cultural sphere. Collaborations include the City of LA Mayor’s Office, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Mark Bradford at the Venice Biennale, and MoMA. Munro’s writing appears in the book W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, published by Princeton Architectural Press and featured in Smithsonian magazine, the New Yorker, and Black Perspectives. Munro expanded this research into the first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design, which continues to shed light on moments of oppression and visibility. Munro holds an MFA from CalArts and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Munro is founding faculty member and cochair for the MFA in graphic design at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is particularly interested in the often-unaddressed postcolonial relationship between design and marginalized communities.