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Sixto-Juan Zavala (he/him) is a designer and illustrator from Texas and is currently based in London. He holds a BFA in Communication Design from Texas State University and an MA in Narrative Environments from UAL: Central Saint Martins. He has worked in the creative field for over ten years, using illustration, collage, and custom typography to create layered, evocative imagery. Zavala is especially interested in culture, marginalised groups, and the environment, and how visual communication and spatial design can facilitate cultural change.
Zavala’s professional experience includes working at a design agency, a non-profit museum, as a freelance designer, part of an in-house design team, and as an artist. He founded Queer Botany, an ecocritical project that studies and affirms connections between queerness and nature. He is part of the arts collective Essentials Creative and Art Director for the queer Latinx literary publisher Raspa. In these roles he’s worked on exhibition design, restaurant and retail redesign, branding, art direction, illustration, installation art, community workshops, VJing, and projection.
Zavala is the winner of the 2021 Spatial Cultural Equity award from the Spatial Practices Program Prizes and was nominated for a MullenLowe NOVA Award, the Spatial Practices Prize, and The Steve Lumby Drawing Prize. He has been published in multiple publications including Graphis Poster Annual 2019, Plant Kingdom: Design with Plant Aesthetics (2015), Communication Arts Design Annual 56 (2015), and has exhibited work at The People’s Gallery (Austin, TX), Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin, TX), Gravelmouth Gallery (San Antonio, TX), and Silkwörm Gallery (San Antonio, TX).
Photo by Margarita Vogiatzi. Lighting by Chih-Yu Mandy Liu.