Emily Larned

Occasional Newsletter: 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 and widely collected collaborations and reissues from feminist archives. She lives and works in Storrs Mansfield, CT, where she is an Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut. 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 is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA, est. 2008), a union for reflective creative practice. To date ILSSA counts nearly 500 members in 37 states and 6 countries. ILSSA explores the immaterial working conditions of impractical laborers through participatory projects, publications, and exhibitions. ILSSA is an ongoing collaboration with artist, educator, and arts advocate Bridget Elmer.

Emily's award-winning handmade artist books, zines, & publications (including Muffin Bones zine, Memorytown USA zine, Parfait zine, artist books under her former imprint Red Charming, as well as more recent publications) are collected by over 80 institutions internationally, including the Tate, the Brooklyn Museum, the V&A, & the Smithsonian, & are exhibited around the world. 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). She graduated from Yale School of Art with an MFA in Graphic Design.

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 for eight years. She has taught at every education level from after-school program through MFA, & has presented about her work at dozens of institutions. 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 has taught 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.