Assistant Professor, Graphic Design
Rambod Vala is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and educator whose work spans graphic and moving images. His practice fluidly integrates video, installation, typography, storytelling, and layered narrative structures interweaving realism and fantasy, politics and romance, skepticism and belief.
In 2019, Vala co founded Unche Studio, a collaborative platform operating at the intersection of graphic, architectural, and object design through the lens of fine art. Named after the Farsi word “آنچه” (meaning “that which”), the studio embraces uncertainty, the unseen, and the not-yet-defined.
Vala earned his MFA in Art, Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2015. His projects have been presented at a multitude of venues internationally, including the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and featured in the New York Times in January 2020.
He is a two-time recipient of the Award for Typographic Excellence from the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago, in 2010 and 2025. He has also received the Luminarts Fellowship from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation and the Runner-Up Award from the Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation in 2016.
In March 2022, Vala completed a residency at Delfina Foundation in London, further expanding his international research and collaborative practice.