BFA Graphic Design
Rhode Island School of Design
2024

Currently

Junior Designer
Can Can Press
CDMX

Listening to
Now I’ve Got A Lot You Know
Sophia Stel

Reading
Beyond the Image
Alessandro Sbordoni

Previously

Studio Intern
Women’s Studio Workhsop
Rosendale, NY

Design Intern
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
NYC

Listening to
Summertime
The Sundays

Reading
Wasting Time on the Internet
Kenneth Goldsmith

Exhibitions

i had this dream and you were in it
Rosendale, NY
2026

light/house
New Paltz, NY
2025

Dallas Zine Fair
Dallas, TX
2024

Queer/Trans Zine Fair
Providence, RI
2024

It Takes a Village
Providence, RI
2024

RISD Create
Providence, RI
2022, 2023

RISD Unbound
Providence, RI
2022
Ollantay Avila Alcocer𐔌*ˊᵕˋ*𐦯
is an artist, designer, technician, and writer. Interested in ornamentation, collection, and annotation, her practice explores everyday design languages, motifs, and the ways in which we visually communicate identity. Through writing and language, typography, illustration, photography, and printmaking techniques, she considers layered meanings and balances contradictions–irony and sincerity, efficiency and chaos, analog and digital–to capture a multitudinous, dissonant, yet thoughtful voice.

Email
Instagram
Spotify
Turn-of-Phrases

Slowly but Surely

A Fondness

All Lightness, No Weight

Tender Somber Saturday Night

Books

Y tu mamá también: A Collection 
of Stills and Essays

Things Are Going to Change (and, Hopefully, for the Better)

these are the things i keep in my pockets

Patterns

Pattern (Or, at the Very Latest, the Winter)

Pattern (in the snow)

Comics

The Baseline Comic

Small Talk

Two Worms (in looove...)

My Hair Keeps Me Warm While I’m Dreaming

Sleep Talking All Night Long
The “Everyday Designer”: On Ornamentation, Annotation, etc.
Research & Writing, Publication
Spring 2024-Current


The desire to be understood, to reimagine, to build worlds for oursleves is profoundly human. Stickers, pins, doodles, embroidery, charms, graffiti, sign-painting, wheat-pasting, tattoos, memes, etc., all draw on the instinct to ornament, decorate, anotate, to imbue the surface with sentiment, self-expression, and agency. By doing so, we keep the surface malleable, a space in which we can perpetually be in conversation with the original. To ornament is to embrace the chaos of multiplicity with open arms, to consider.




I am timeless yet timely2024; Risograph Prints; Edition of 50.


Assorted Memes



Neue Meme

An Archive of found letterforms from the internet. Taking from the design language of memes, Neue Meme captures the surrealist, chaotic, and poetic rhythm of being online.



A Reader for the “Everyday Designer”

A collection of writings, memes, tools, and prints surrounding ornamentation, annotation, and authorship which the reader can curate and customize. Laser-printed publication on assorted paper with Risograph-printed inserts, custom sticker sheets, and prong fastener binding.



“Every Day I Wake Up [Criying]”:
An “Everyday Designer” on Ornamentation, Decoration, and Memes
(TL;DR Version)

Blind embossed silkscreen with prong fastener binding. Publication with option of unfolding into a poster. Abbreviated and adapted from working essay Every day i wake up [criying]!: An Essay for the “Everyday Designer”. Read the TL;DR version here. Edition of 20.


You Can’t Piss on What You Can’t Catch:
on Ornament, Modernism, Authorship, Production, Labor, and Bootlegs

A graphic essay that examines the evolution of design, production, and authorship through an analysis of the bootleg. How have our tools, contexts, and references affected the ways we make and work? The book is an exploration of the surface and its malleability–through its ornamentation, annotation, and intervention, the original is reimagined by the collective.

Turn of Phrases


Slowly but Surely

Spray paint, T-shirt
2024