“White Default”

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller, Activist, decolonizing graphic design professor, lecturer, and revisionist historian

Monday, March 28,, 2022, 5:30 PM EST

via YouTube Live

Co-hosted by  DMD professor, Ting Zhou, and DMD undergraduate students, Jailyn Murphy and Brendan Acton.

Watch the Recording of the Event:

In this talk, Dr. Cheryl D. Miller explores the concept of “White Default” as the norm for a mass media platform of marketing, branding, and advertising which is blind to the need for addressing a diverse and global marketplace audience! She clears up the “blind eye” which doesn’t see a broad audience in today’s world of cyberspace, social media, and traditional mass media and communications!

About the Speaker:

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller is recognized for her outsized influence within the graphic design profession to end the marginalization of BIPOC designers through her civil rights activism, industry exposé trade writing, research rigor, and archival vision. Miller is a national leader of minority rights, gender, race diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion advocacy in graphic design.

She is founder of the former Cheryl D. Miller Design, Inc., NYC, a social impact design firm; she is a designer, author, trade writer for PRINT Magazine and Communication Arts Magazine, and theologian.

Dr. Miller has an MS in Communications Design from Pratt Institute and a BFA in Graphic Design from Maryland Institute College of Art, completed Foundation Studies at Rhode Island School of Design, and has a Doctor of Humane Letters from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a MDiv from Union Theological Seminary.

A recipient of countless awards, she is dedicated to visual arts advancement. The Cheryl D. Miller Collection at Stanford University is her legacy professional firm’s archive, including her memoir research and manuscripts. The collection features D&I initiatives, corporate communications developed for Fortune 500 corporations, and corporate communications for national African American organizations, developed post-Civil Rights Era, 1974–1994.

She is an activist, decolonizing graphic design professor, lecturer, and revisionist historian. She is Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Design at the University of Texas–Austin, E.W. Doty Fellow 2021, and adjunct professor at Howard University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Vermont College of Fine Arts and the President’s Global Advisory Board of Maryland Institute College of Art.

Back to: Diverse Perspectives in Digital Media & Design 2022 Events