We’re Excited To Introduce The Jury Members For Hand Lettering, Illustration, Graphic Novels, and Invitations
Whether it’s a storyline in a graphic novel, an emotional tone in an invitation, or a personalized touch in hand lettering and illustration, these creative disciplines serve as powerful tools for communication, evoking emotions, and leaving lasting impressions. To evaluate the entries, we invited three esteemed jurors — Alice Li, Paul Peart Smith, and Edel Rodriguez — experts with the insight and experience needed to recognize standout work across these creative categories.
Alice Li
Knowing that a well-thought-out strategy helps elevate design to be not only visually appealing but also emotionally resonant and commercially successful, bridging the gap between art and audience, we asked Alice Li to join the PRINT Awards team this year.
Alice is the Director of Innovation Strategy at sparks & honey, part of Omnicom Media Group, where she leverages tech-driven social and cultural intelligence to help organizations navigate mega and macro shifts, ensuring they remain ahead of accelerating change. As a quantitative futurist with a demonstrated history in foresight and innovation strategy, Alice has consulted with numerous C-suite executives of Fortune 500 businesses to support their decision-making processes.
Besides her career in management consulting, Alice serves as a distinguished judge for international design awards, dedicated to empowering the design community with diverse cultural resources. This, in turn, would enable the next generation to future-proof their design choices and become responsible and reflective members of society as they begin making meaningful contributions to the world.
Paul Peart Smith
We’re also thrilled to welcome comics artist and writer Paul Peart Smith as a juror, especially with the addition of Graphic Novels as a new category in the 2025 PRINT Awards. He has completed a graphic novel adaptation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk for Rutgers University Press, and his latest adaptation, An Indigenous Peoples’s History of the United States, is being published by Beacon Press.
The thing I’m most excited about in my work is arranging the puzzle of a new page—making images and word placement flow so that a sequence comes to a satisfying end.
Paul Peart Smith
Edel Rodriguez
After featuring Edel Rodriguez as a PRINT Bookclub guest with the publication of his memoir, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey, we knew we would be extremely grateful to have him join our jury. Edel is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Havana, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Spain. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, mortality, and cultural displacement.
Born in Havana, Cuba in 1971, Edel was raised in El Gabriel, a small farm town surrounded by fields of tobacco and sugar cane. In 1980 he and his family boarded a boat and left for America during the Mariel boatlift. They settled in Miami where Rodriguez was introduced to and influenced by American pop culture for the first time.
In 1994, Edel graduated with honors in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 1998, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Manhattan’s Hunter College graduate program. Throughout his career, he’s received commissions to create artwork for numerous book publishers, film companies, advertising agencies, and editorial publications. He is a regular contributor to the The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, and has created over a hundred newspaper and magazine covers for clients such as TIME Magazine, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. In addition, Edel has created dozens of book covers for clients such as Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House. Rodriguez has also created several stamps for the U.S. Postal Service and has illustrated poster and advertising campaigns for many operas, films, and Broadway shows.
Rodriguez’s artwork is in the collections of a variety of institutions, including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., as well as in numerous private collections. His work has received numerous awards from The Art Director’s Club and The Society of Illustrators in New York City. Rodriguez is the author of four children’s books. His memoir “Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey” was published by Metropolitan books in the fall of 2023.
Submit Your Work Today and Let These Expert Jurors See Your Creativity Shine!
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 From Pen to Print, Meet the PRINT Awards Jurors Shaping Your Story appeared first on PRINT Magazine.