A roundup of ideas and projects from around the Institute
WWD featured the news that Nicholas Daley will be honored with this year’s Pratt Fashion Visionary Award at the “2025 Pratt Shows: Fashion” event on May 16. Fashion Chair Lisa Z. Morgan acknowledged Daley’s “dedication to storytelling through design, commitment to responsible practices and ability to reimagine cultural narratives within contemporary fashion.”
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice Carlos Motta’s mid-career retrospective exhibition Pleas of Resistance is running at MACBA. The exhibition covers over 25 years of work, exploring “the magnitude of Motta’s artistic research and its implacable rigor in relation to the archive, interrogating its violence, its silencing and its desires.”
Lady Gaga wore a custom hat designed by Sarah Sokol, BFA Interior Design ’11, during her performance at the 2025 Super Bowl.
Mylo Butler, BFA Film ’21, shot a motion cover for Ebony Magazine.
Yimeng Zhang, MS Packaging, Identities, and Systems Design ’25, was interviewed in Canvas Rebel. “Many of my ideas come in flashes of inspiration—sometimes within a day or two—but the real challenge lies in prototyping, refining, and modifying them repeatedly. The final product must be visually compelling, practical, and, most importantly, cost-effective.”
Assistant Professor in the School of Information Shruthi Chivukula published a paper with colleagues “Tracing the History and Evolution of Dark Patterns on Twitter from 2010–2021” in ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
Tomokazu Matsuyama, MFA Communications Design ’04, who is exhibiting at LA Frieze Week, was profiled in Observer. “Matsuyama’s densely layered compositions capture the full complexity of today’s cultural and aesthetic landscape, integrating a wide spectrum of visual languages,” writes Elisa Carollo. “His work freely merges globally pervasive elements of American consumer culture with sophisticated references to Japanese prints and centuries-old artistic traditions, alongside nods to key moments in art history.”
Visiting Associate Professor of Graduate Communications Design, Trustee Emeritus, and Pratt Legends Honoree Marc A. Rosen, MFA ’70, was interviewed for an article in Harper’s Bazaar India about perfume bottle artistry. “There are many moving parts to creating a perfume bottle, the ergonomics taking precedence over artistry at the designing stage. We take into account several factors—the demography, the marketing elements, and the competition—before designing the bottle,” he said. “The proportion of the bottle, whether glass can even be blown for intricate designs, creating a harmonious user experience, all of these elements come into play in bottle design.”
Philip Sorenson reviewed Adjunct Associate Professor Laura Henriksen’s debut poetry collection Laura’s Desires for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Laura’s Desires is about seeing and being seen, not just by people but also by art itself. It’s about desire and media’s role in awakening, associating, and transforming it.”
MFA Fashion Collection + Communication students participated in a Zombie Workshop led by British artist Jeremy Hutchison. “The workshop, based on Hutchison’s work Dead White Man, aims to subvert the ideology of fast fashion by hijacking its aesthetics. Students concluded the workshop by packaging their zombies as toxic commodities, creating lookbooks, styling, video, and photography.”
From Pratt Institute News
From Pratt Institute News
