Emily Larned

Substack mailing list: Till & Drift
Instagram: @emilylarned
Contact: [email protected]
CV

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she made her first zine. Her imprint Alder & Frankia (est. 2016) publishes award-winning, widely collected collaborations from feminist archives, including in 2025–26 the publication and exhibition Workshopping at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA, est. 2008), which explores the immaterial working conditions of impractical laborers through participatory projects, publications, and exhibitions. ILSSA has installed exhibitions at a dozen institutions across the country, including the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (NC), Colorado College (CO), Webster University (MO), and Ringling College of Art + Design (FL).

Emily lives and works in Storrs Mansfield, CT, where she is an Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Connecticut. She will serve as Director of Graduate Studies in Art commencing in fall 2026. She is currently making a book about the "non-traditional" New Haven Police Academy (1992–2008) with its former director K.D. Codish, a lifelong activist, feminist theater director, and graphic designer who worked tirelessly to recruit, educate, and train a new kind of community-based police officer.

Emily's handmade artist books, zines, & publications are collected by over 90 institutions internationally, including the Tate, the Brooklyn Museum, the V&A, & the Smithsonian, & are exhibited around the world. Her work is included in the forthcoming 2026–2027 Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum decennial of new art made in Connecticut, I am what is around me.Her work has received accolades from the AIGA (50 Books | 50 Covers), the Type Directors Club (TDC) (The World's Best Typography), and the Connecticut Art Directors Club (CADC) (Gold & Silver awards in Book Design, Spirit of Creativity Award).

Emily learned letterpress printing as an apprentice to Robin Price while an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, & she served on the Board of Booklyn Artists Alliance from 2001–2009. She graduated from Yale School of Art with an MFA in Graphic Design in 2008. From 2009–2019 she was Chair of Graphic Design at the Shintaro Akatsu School of Design (SASD) at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she established SASD Design Service, a sliding-scale, community-oriented, student-run, award-winning design studio. She joined the faculty at UConn in 2019. She has taught widely, including at UAL's Central St. Martins (London, UK), Colorado College, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase College, Visual Studies Workshop, Anhui Polytechnic University (Anhui, Wuhu, China), Ludong University (Yantai, Ludong, China), and Art New England at Bennington College. She is looking forward to teaching Riso Ephemera: Printing the Day at Women's Studio Workshop in July 2026.