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CHEN LUO                

Chen Luo is a graphic designer and educator based in Maryland. In 2026, she will join Howard University as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design. She has previously taught at MICA, the SMFA at Tufts University, Boston University, and UMass. Chen maintains an independent design practice, collaborating primarily with artists, galleries, and cultural institutions. She is also the co-founder of Body&Forma, a collective design practice that bridges linguistic and cultural barriers through publishing and performative workshops. Her work reconfigures reading and writing gestures as bodily acts, transforming static materials into participatory, communal, and kinetic forms of publishing. She currently explores how embodied publishing can engage diverse readerships and foster communal experiences. Her work has been recognized by Communication Arts, NewOne Awards, Design 360°, Boston Art Review, and The Young Ones TDC, and exhibited in Canada, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, and the United States.
Dance with Prints: Your Body & A Poster & A Book 


Performance
2022
The process grew from individual performance to a collective action. I used ambiguous instructions like “kiss your poster”, “hug your book”, “disrespect your book”, “lift your poster together”, “clap for the publisher/author”, “each person read a word from the books out aloud, etc. I also brought some spreads in variable sizes and cut out handle shapes and thumb shapes along outer margins. Participants who picked the books had to hold the handles and read the spreads and books together. The process unpacks the invisible default of hand interacting with books, it groups people to read together and share the reproductive labor of one person holding one page. The distance between the two readers is shifted by the size of the spreads. This workshop recontextualizes how graphic design creates a community. The experimentation challenges canonical interaction and critiques historical procedures of how the body, proportion, space, and movement have been interpreted, articulated, and elucidated with 2D graphic design prints.
Late update in 2025