All Grants | Cycle 1 –
Faride Mereb is a Venezuelan award-winning art director, book designer, and researcher living and working in New York City, co-directing the design studio and archive center Letra Muerta Inc.
She has achieved numerous awards with the studio, including the 2024 Grand Prix for best book design in the Latin American Design Awards and Best Design Studio in Venezuela. In 2022 she won the 10×10 Research Grant on Photobooks by Women supporting her formative research on Venezuela’s first known female graphic designer, Karmele Leizaola. Mereb was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, (2021-2022), and a guest professor at Yale University, (Fall 2024), where she taught the module for Latin America and The Caribbean in Geoff Kaplan’s class for History of Graphic Design: A set of Alternatives.
Links
Profile Links
Faride Mereb’s Website
Research Links
Research Documentation on Faride Mereb’s Website
Karmele Leizola Wikipedia Page
Website for Karmele Leizola
Publication Links
Sandra Caula, “Karmele Leizaola: la leyenda del diseño de medios impresos.” Chico 8 (6 February 2021).
Thinking through Graphic Design History. Aggie Toppins, ed. (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Women Graphic Designers. Elizabeth Resnick, ed. (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Exhibitions Links
@Archivo Grafico
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Faride Mereb—00:27:35)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Karmele Leizaola and Venezuelan Publishing
Faride Mereb’s research grant allowed her to explore the groundbreaking career of Venezuelan graphic designer Karmele Leizaola, whose pioneering work shaped the nation’s design identity. Her research results were presented in “Karmele Leizaola and Venezuelan Publishing,” an exhibition and newspaper zine released in 2022.
“Se aprende mirando bien”: Karmele Leizaola and How Migration and the Female Condition Have Influenced Image Reproduction in Venezuela
Karmele Leizaola, who was born in the Basque Country between Spain and France, moved to Venezuela around 1945. At a very young age, she became one of the most influential female editorial designers in Venezuela. Considering herself “Caraqueña” (a native of Caracas), her design interest began with photography and her father’s Leica camera, and flourished into a highly successful career as a sought-after designer for newspapers and periodical publications.
Limited research on Leizaola’s design and editorial work has been undertaken over the past ten years, with records of her activities relatively scarce. Until my research, all that existed was a short student documentary film and a couple of interviews in Spanish with her. The work of Leizaola, along with that of her female peers, serves not only as a map of women’s involvement in design and photography in Venezuela specifically but also as a timeline of Venezuela’s socioeconomic rise and fall, and women’s larger role in Latin American photography. According to a 2019 study by AIGA, the professional association for design, fewer than 5% of designers are biracial, and only 8% are “Hispanic” or Latin. This research reveals the limited representation of BIPOC designers, not only based on gender but also based on ethnicity.
Leizaola worked at several renowned Venezuelan presses, such as Tipografía Vargas, where many significant books were printed. Her family’s ties to printing go further back with her father, who immigrated to Venezuela before her arrival, also working at Tipografía Vargas as a manager. She developed her distinctive design style for printed matter while working on publications like Elite Magazine, which was founded in 1925 and was deeply influenced by the impact of oil and its production on the Venezuelan economy. Important Venezuelan photographers, such as Thea Segall, who was also an immigrant, are showcased in many of Leizaola’s layouts, which are noteworthy for their new style that combines images and text in what is currently known as information design. In a male-dominated world, Leizaola created a space for herself, despite the harsh conditions under the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. Having fled the Spanish Civil War consequences, she remained in Venezuela until health conditions necessitated her return to Madrid, where she now lives.
During her time in Venezuela, advances in printing techniques influenced image reproduction, which subsequently made space for the aesthetics of new visual characteristics. Gravure and intaglio printing techniques, for example, created high-contrast images that were representative of the visual language in Venezuela at this time, later used in publications such as Revista CaL by NEDO M.F.
The funds I received from 10×10 Photobooks’ Research Grant on Photobook History were used to process and digitize selections from Karmele Leizaola’s archives in Venezuela. My research focused on the printed publications she worked on as a designer from the 1950s to the 1990s, to make them available online. Towards that end, I designed and published a small newspaper-like publication with an essay based on my research and a timeline of Leizaola’s life and work, illustrated by a selection of her works. I also created a Wikipedia page that includes a selection of photographs for public use under Creative Commons. This allowed me not only to make a visual map of her work but also to document the work of many other female photographers, designers, and journalists in Venezuela who appeared alongside Leizaola in publications. The results reveal how her work was influenced not only by the specific political and cultural context of Venezuela in the 1950s-1990s, but also how the lack of access to other technologies in that specific part of South America contributed to the design sensibility of Karmele Leizaola, a woman and an immigrant. This subject is deeply woven into my contemporary practice as a woman and immigrant designer living in the United States.
Research and design assistance by Oriana Nuzzi.