UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Stuckeman School’s Department of Graphic Design in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture has announced that designer, activist and educator Brooke Hull will join its faculty ranks as an assistant professor, effective Aug. 1.
Hull focuses their research on fatness and marginalized identity with the goal of expanding design education — and education, in general — for every human body. In their design work, they experiment with visually communicating the topics they are researching to help their work be accessible to a wider, public audience as a form of activism and advocacy.
“Brooke’s established research interests and scholarship bring breadth of expertise to the department as a whole,” said Darrin Thornton, interim head of the Department of Graphic Design. “Their enthusiasm for teaching and mentoring students will have a positive impact and complement existing faculty in the graphic design department.”
Hull comes to Penn State from Gainesville, Florida, where they earned a master of fine arts in design and visual communication along with a graduate certificate in women and gender studies from the University of Florida (UF). While there, Hull most recently served as teaching assistant and co-creator of a design technologies course for design majors. They also held positions as an instructor of record, social media designer and graduate teaching assistant for a variety of design courses while pursuing their graduate degree.
Hull also is an invited guest teacher of activism with the University of Copenhagen, DIS study abroad program, focusing on fat and queer activism.
Hull’s notable recent activism and advocacy projects include:
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“Designing for Intersectional Fat Liberation: Leveraging Co-design & Ethnographic Methods to Document Fat Lived Experiences” — an internationally recognized research and co-designed project that visually represents the intersectional lived experiences of eight fat people to advance fat representation and liberation.
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“Researching through Critical Making: Using Illustrated Letterforms to Represent Fat, Intersectional Bodies within Design” — a public-facing design and illustration project that has evolved alongside their formal research praxis for them to visually communicate the need for fat representation in design through reimagined typography.
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“(The Struggle for) Queer Existence within Design History” — a public-facing research and design project that shares queer designers throughout design history and examines and questions their existence in design archives.
This summer, Hull is presenting a short talk titled “Sharing the challenges and successes of researching with and about fat folks in the project, ‘Designing for Intersectional Fat Liberation,’” as well showing their work in the on-demand virtual exhibition, “‘Say Fat,’ A Virtual Exhibition of Fat Lived Experiences,” both at the 10th Annual International Weight Stigma Conference in the U.K. and online. They also are presenting at the Design Research Society ’24 Conference in Boston for their co-written paper with Dori Griffin, design researcher and educator, titled “Making Space Online: Situating Complex, Intersectional Identities.”
Hull has presented and displayed their work at numerous national and international design and interdisciplinary conferences as well as juried exhibitions. They also have co-written papers that are published in multiple design conference proceedings and an upcoming peer-reviewed journal.
“We are thrilled to welcome Brooke to the Stuckeman School,” said Chingwen Cheng, director of the Stuckeman School. “Their design advocacy work and their dedication in creating a learning environment for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging aligns with school’s core values and are critical to the Stuckeman School community.”
As a designer, Hull has worked on several projects for UF’s College of the Arts, mostly recently being a publication for the Harn Museum of Art. Prior to that, they were the lead graphic design intern with the Office of Design and Communication and for The Art Gallery at the University of West Florida, where they graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in graphic design and a minor in marketing and interdisciplinary honor’s studies in 2021.