Our guest speakers reflect Letrástica’s plural, open, and inclusive spirit. Through their experiences, processes, and perspectives, the festival seeks to build a diverse, generous, and truly global meeting point.
We will continue announcing more speakers soon.
Ying Chang is a lettering artist whose practice is built from rhythm, repetition, and attention. Working with letters is her way of thinking and staying present, a principle she also brings into calligraphy, type, and design. Her work centers on endurance, process, and the ongoing negotiation between precision and imperfection.
Trading a structured New York City life and career in advertising for an adventure on the road, Ying carried her practice from place to place, literally on her back, for 3 years. She now resides in Svalbard, where she is establishing her first studio in 2026, marking a point of stability within a practice shaped by constant motion.
Influenced by philosophy, solitude, and the physical rhythm of working with her hands, Ying treats practice as something lived. The devotion to discipline, slowness, and quietness manifests beyond her art - it also reflects how her life takes form.
Loche (Alejandro Lo Celso) was an art director for magazines and newspapers in Buenos Aires before graduating with honors from the MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and later from ANRT, the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy, France. In 2001, Loche founded PampaType, the first Argentine type foundry and one of the pioneers in the region. Loche’s typefaces have received awards from ATypI, the Type Directors Club, Morisawa, Creative Review, Typographica, Hii, the Ibero-American Design Biennial, and several editions of Tipos Latinos.
With more than 20 years of experience, the PampaType team is passionate about designing custom typefaces for special projects, as well as creating retail typefaces available through its own website, Adobe, and TypeNetwork.
Loche has taught numerous classes, workshops, and lectures on typography, lettering, and the history of letterforms across the Americas, Europe, and beyond.
Viviana Monsalve is a Colombian graphic designer who graduated from the National University of Colombia, with postgraduate studies in Digital and Typographic Design at the University of Buenos Aires. After working in design studios in Colombia and Argentina, being part of communication teams in public and private companies, and teaching undergraduate typography courses, Monsalve now works as an independent graphic and type designer.
Her interest in typography comes from understanding it as a technology, one with the power to make written culture more accessible and functional for a broader audience. Recently, Monsalve has become more involved in font production, contributing mainly to the font project onboarding process at Google Fonts.
Nina Stössinger (she/they) is the Senior Typeface Designer at Frere-Jones Type, an independent typeface design firm in Brooklyn NY, and a Critic for typeface design at Yale School of Art. In addition to several award-winning retail typefaces (most recently, Cassis and Edgar, the latter designed together with Tobias Frere-Jones), Nina has designed or co-designed custom type for the New York City Football Club, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Microsoft, and SAS Institute, among others.
Nina previously served on the Board of Directors of the Type Directors Club, chairing the 22nd TDC Typeface Design Competition. Originally from Basel in Switzerland, Nina studied multi-media design in Halle/Germany, and typeface design in Zurich and The Hague. They enjoy the confluence of form and content, language, history, and technology in typeface design, and aim to never stop learning.
Kenji Nakayama is a visual artist and sign painter born in Hokkaido, Japan. He trained as a mechanical engineer, but in 2004 moved to Boston to study sign painting at the now-defunct Butera School of Art.
Since then, Kenji has developed a strong artistic practice, lettering and painting signs for shops, restaurants, and institutions across New England. He also maintains a visual art practice focused on painting and public art.
In addition, he teaches workshops and promotes the preservation of traditional brush sign-painting techniques, sharing this craft with new generations of artists, designers, and sign painters.
A professor for more than 17 years at several Mexican universities, he was coordinator of the Specialization in Typographic Innovation at CENTRO, Design, Film and Television, where he currently teaches courses related to typography and type design.
He has worked for various print media outlets, including Reforma newspaper, La Jornada, UAM, among others. His work has been recognized and published nationally and internationally, including at the 1st and 2nd Biennial of Socio-Political Poster in Auschwitz, Poland; Good 50x70 in Milan, Italy; Esquire magazine; the Quórum Award; among others. He has also served as a jury member for various competitions and calls, including the FONCA grant.
Today, he works as a calligrapher, consultant, and lettering designer, collaborating on brand activations for Mont Blanc, Dior, Burberry, José Cuervo, Cartier, Hermès, Dolce & Gabbana, among many others.
James Plattner is a type designer/letterer based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Collaborating with clients large and small, he utilizes the power of bespoke typography to distinguish brands from the competition.
James is the founder of Plattner Type, a foundry focused on expressive letterforms that sing instead of talking, and publishes in-progress type through Future Fonts.
Sahar Afshar is an independent type designer and researcher based in London. She holds a PhD in Printing History from Birmingham City University and is part of the advisory boards of the Centre for Printing History and Culture in Birmingham and the Type Directors Club in New York.
Sahar divides her time between her practice as a type designer, with more than a decade of experience working on various retail and custom typefaces, and her research, where she explores the technological, cultural, and political dimensions of typography and printing, as well as the ways these aspects converge across different historical contexts. She is the Lead Instructor for Type West Online, where she helps students from around the world expand their creative potential to create their own typefaces.