These PRINT Awards Jurors Pollinate Positive Change
Like a garden where thoughtful care cultivates blossoms of hope and transformation, design for social impact can uplift individuals, communities, and ecosystems. Often, through collaboration with diverse stakeholders, including marginalized communities, social impact designers focus on creating equitable, inclusive, and sustainable solutions that improve well-being. We’re so excited to welcome an impressive team of jurors—Silas Munro, Melissa Sanchez-Dunning, and Eleazar Ruiz— to consider entries in this category this year.
Silas Munro
Silas Munro is a designer, artist, writer, researcher, curator and surfer. He is the founder of the design studio Polymode based in Los Angeles and Raleigh, which works with clients across cultural spheres. Commissions and collaborations include: The New York Times Magazine, MIT Press, Nike, Airbnb, the Brooklyn Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dia Art Foundation, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Munro is the curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest at Letterform Archive and Reverberations: Lineages in Design History, opening at the Ford Foundation Gallery this spring. He was a contributor to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and co-authored the first BIPOC-centered design history course, “Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19–21st Century.”
His work was recently exhibited at the Raizes Gallery at Lesley University, the LA Design Festival, and the Scottsdale Museum of Art, and is included in the collections of Tufts University, Lesley University, and the Montalvo Arts Center. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at The University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery, and the group show “Printing Black America” at Print Center New York. Munro is Founding Faculty, Chair Emeritus for the MFA Program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Marisa Sanchez-Dunning
Marisa Sanchez-Dunning is the Chicana woman behind If Only Creative, a Bay Area creative studio that builds and executes brand design, strategy, social media management, and trend-setting commercial photography. A veteran of working with POC-owned and purpose-driven brands, Sanchez-Dunning possesses a POV that taps into different cultures and can resonate with a global and diverse audience.
Sustainability, equity, transparency, authenticity, and quality are central to this POV. If Only Creative became a reality because she was motivated and driven to craft a better world for creatives from all backgrounds. Whether it’s developing a sustainable materials guide, working with high-profile brands like Whole Foods, Bawi, and Date Better, or hosting, El Otro Lado, a series of dinners reclaiming and celebrating Cinco de Mayo, Sanchez-Dunning has proven herself a game-changing creative director and founder with a talent for design leadership and strategic thinking, dreaming up brands rooted in human connection and industry know-how. She has spoken at conferences like AIGA, Brand New, and Dieline.
The one thing that I get excited about is the opportunity to support the purpose + impact driven brands that need it the most. We design from a very particular lens within If Only Creative, and it’s one that I’m incredibly proud of.
Melissa Sanchez-Dunning
Eleazar Ruiz
Eleazar Ruiz is an award-winning Dominican graphic designer, creative director, and founder of Odd Notion. With over 15 years as a brand strategist, Ruiz has worked simultaneously in the worlds of in-house design teams, design agencies, and start-ups, creating immersive brand identities and website experiences as well as nonprofit organizations. One such organization is Serve LA, a nonprofit that provides meals, recovery, and holistic support to the unseen among us in the city. Odd Notion provided creative direction, brand strategy, a brand identity system, as well as the campaign and brand book.
Ruiz understands firsthand the struggles when launching or scaling up a brand, having built multiple businesses himself, and learning from both success and failure. Some of the consumer brands on his roster include Nike, The Oregonian, Lyft, Microsoft, and Xbox.
If you’ve created designs for social impact, enter the PRINT Awards and share your work with these expert jurors!
For more information about our full 2025 PRINT Awards jury and to enter the competition this year, visit the PRINT Awards site and be sure to submit your work by January 21 for the best rates of the season!
The post Meet the 2025 PRINT Awards Jury for Design for Social Impact appeared first on PRINT Magazine.