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TORI WATSON
GRAPHIC DESIGN EDUCATOR
MFA GRAPHIC DESIGN / OTIS COLLEGE / 2026
MY TEACHING PRACTICE
TEACHING
SENIOR PROJECTS
Supported a cohort of 17 senior students through a semester-long thesis project by facilitating weekly check-ins and research development. Met one-on-one with students to help define project scope and research questions. Provided feedback on presentations and process documentation.
GATHERING TYPOGRAPHY
This project introduces the practice of gathering, an intentional, subjective collecting of materials that informs a creative practice. According to Mindy Seu, gathering is an ongoing process that generates meaning through the connections formed between materials that would otherwise never interact. For this project, you will begin to understand your own design instincts by paying close attention to your surroundings and collecting typography inspirations from the world around you. Together, we will arrange these materials into a living archive: a typographic “vessel” that you can return to as your practice evolves.
TYPOGRAPHY I / OTIS COLLEGE / FALL 2025
TYPOGRAPHY REMIX
Taught a “Type Remixing” workshop in Illustrator, leading a live demonstration to guide students through advanced type modification techniques and encourage a more experimental approach to typography. Developed an album-cover assignment that required students to manipulate type and pair typefaces. As a result, students gained greater confidence in their typographic decision-making and developed a stronger understanding of Illustrator tools.
RESEARCH
RESEARCH / WEB SCHEMATIC / 2025
QUEER TYPE SCHEMATIC
I used GraphCommons to build a network connecting queer design terms, including all the formal attributes of typography, and linking them to larger cultural issues they are affiliated with and those they stand in opposition to. For example, soft connects to hard, femme, script, white, conformity, italics, lowercase, organic, mess, and radical softness. The network offers a simplified view of how typographic concepts exist within and reflect broader cultural biases.
VIEW THE SCHEMATIC
RESEARCH / WEB ARCHIVE / 2025
WHAT IS QUEER TYPE?
This archive holds most of my queer design research, inspired by Paul Soulellis’s essay, “What is queer typography?” (2021). You can sort the images by dragging them, clicking the sort button to snap them to pre-determined categories: writing, history, archive, performance, publication, and typefaces, or double-clicking opens a window for more details and sources. The idea is that queer typography means something different to each person, so I’m presenting a canvas for each user to construct a new narrative.
VISIT THE ARCHIVE
RESEARCH / EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO / 2025
FLESH/TEETH/TYPE
This experimental video presents typography as a site of bodily exchange. Helvetica is cast in wax + sugar. Queer type is made through queer acts…through queer bodies that leave marks behind.
MFA GRAPHIC DESIGN THESIS / RESEARCH / 2026
SPLICE
What if we could preserve information inside the body itself? Splice is a 3D typeface in which every character is a real human protein structure sourced from AlphaFold, an open-source database of computationally predicted molecular models. Each glyph was found using pareidolia as a formal methodology: rotating protein models until legible letterforms emerged. Discovered, not designed.
The centerpiece is a mechanical keyboard on a plinth. A screensaver cycles four phrases in the protein typeface: This alphabet is made of you. Your body cannot be erased. Now it is your turn to say something. What are you going to say? A visitor can type anything. Each character renders in real time as a rotating 3D protein molecule. The phrase is simultaneously sonified: amino acids are mapped to musical tones, producing a unique ambient sound for each input.
Three floor-length strips of sheer chiffon printed with protein letterforms hang in the space, responding to movement and touch. Four 3D-printed resin protein sculptures spelling B-O-D-Y are mounted to a mirror, so viewers can see themselves reflected behind the molecules. The interface is set in Computer Modern, designed via Knuth's Metafont, a typeface built from mathematical parameters rather than drawn by hand, echoing Splice’s methodology.
The human body has been translated into language. What are you going to say?
VISIT SPLICE-TYPE.COM
BA ART HISTORY THESIS / RESEARCH / 2022
ART HISTORY PRESENTATION
SUNY NEW PALTZ UNDERGRADUATE ART HISTORY SYMPOSIUM / PRESENTATION / 2022
Nieuwe Kunst, the Dutch iteration of the international Art Nouveau movement, is both underrepresented and under-examined in Anglo-American scholarship. The Netherlands’ contribution to the international movement has been largely discussed through batik. Batik describes both a decorated textile and the wax-resist technique used to create it, in which cloth is decorated with wax, then dyed. Batik originated from Java and gained European exposure through the Dutch East Indies’ colonial trade and through established European artists, such as Henry van de Velde, who infused the medium with the ideals of Art Nouveau. This Europeanized batik was presented to the world as a Dutch innovation–a perfect representation of Nieuwe Kunst–and batik’s complex origins in women’s craft were forgotten.
While batik certainly influenced Nieuwe Kunst, research must recognize batik as not only a medium that was primitivized and appropriated, but as a mastered indigenous craft. This paper investigates the multiplicity of practices and values of five women artists whose different relationships to Dutch nationalism helped shape the use of batik in Nieuwe Kunst and its reception: Eliza van Zuylen and A.J.F. Jans, notorious Indische (Indo-European) entrepreneurs; Raden Adjeng Kartini, prominent Javanese feminist; Agathe Wegerif-Gravestein, owner of the first large-scale batik workshop in the Netherlands; and Bertha Bake, trained Art Nouveau batik artist. This paper also analyzes the different ways the Dutch presented batik on feminist and international stages, focusing on the 1898 Women’s Labor Exhibition and the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. These women created textiles that were woven with colonial, gendered, and nationalistic influences, and a careful examination of their batik reveals the complicated story of how women’s craft contributed to Art Nouveau.