Design Lecture Series w/ Amira Hegazy

The PNCA Design Lecture Series welcomes a broad range of creatives who are breaking expectations of what design can be and do in the world. To kick off our Fall 2025 series, we're welcoming in Chicago-based designer and scholar Amira Hegazy.

Design is a powerful force to build community, interpersonal understanding, belonging, and cooperation. By learning about Chicago's Typographic traditions and history through community-based participatory research, Amira Hegazy identified that behind the design, love is a major motivator and method in most of Chicago's local design cultures.

In this talk, Amira will discuss Love as a method of design, a mode of influence, an aesthetic choice, and a commitment within her own practice.

Our 2025-26 Design Lecture Series explores, loosely, the theme of neighborhoods, and Amira's practice is a thoughtful lens to begin the season. We invite you to take a closer look at the communities around you, whether mapped by shared interests or geographies, in all their wild variation: the intersections between us, the ways we differ, and how design builds connection.

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Amira Hegazy (she/her) makes images, experiences, objects, books, and texts. She also teaches design practice and theory at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research investigates diverse design legacies and Love as an organizing principle in community-driven design, with a focus on typographic expression.

Combining play and scholarly methods, Amira's pedagogy and creative work is multimodal—shifting output to express the most honest form each idea requires. Amira’s 2025 exhibition, “Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types” at the Design Museum of Chicago, investigated Chicago’s typographic legacies. It received an STA 100 award as well as wide critical recognition. Institutions such as the International Print Center of New York, The William King Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Newberry Library, The Art Institute of Chicago, University of Virginia, the Kohler Art Center, and other international venues have exhibited and collected her work.

Join us!

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FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Pacific Northwest College of ArtIn the first-floor Mediatheque511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209

Livestream event available for our communities who can't be here in person!

Register to receive a link and a reminder.

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Hosted by the BFA Graphic Design program at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) since 2016, and co-founded with FISK, the PNCA Design Lecture Series welcomes in a diverse range of creative folks to explore the broad and vibrant potential of design. For more than 100 years, the Pacific Northwest College of Art has served as a dynamic creative center for emerging artists, designers, and creators. PNCA is part of Willamette University.

Find more about Amira at amirahegazy.com, or find her on instagram @amirror.

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Learn more about the PNCA Design community, including more about our program, inspiring student work, alumni, and faculty, at https://pnca.willamette.edu/academics/bfa/graphic-design/ or by following us on instagram @PNCADesign.

Event posters by Nico Bakh '25. All other images (below) courtesy of Amira Hegazy.

Host or Publisher Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA