Dina Benbrahim

Assistant Professor of Graphic Design

Art & Art History

Dina Benbrahim is a Moroccan designer, educator, organizer, and writer, who uses an intersectional feminist lens to investigate design for visibility, civic action, and social justice with minoritized communities to collectively reimagine equitable futures. She has been particularly invested in exploring design histories in North Africa. Among multiple essays she wrote, she is the author of Woven in Oral History: An Incomplete Taxonomy of Amazigh Symbols in the book Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design edited by Kaleena Sales, and A Biased Typographical Collection of Tangier in the book Our Morocco edited by Lucas Peters.

Currently, Dina is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut and the Director of the Department of Art and Art History’s Design Center (DC). She is also the founder and director of Hello Departures, an ever-evolving experimental program at the intersection of design pedagogy, strategy, and community that provokes uplifting transformative possibilities. She additionally serves as a Docent for the Letterform Archive, is on the Advising Council of the School of Architecture and Design at the Lebanese American University and contributes to the Advising Committee at the Medium.

Dina has 6 years of experience teaching in higher education, and 8 years of industry experience in design, art direction, copywriting, and entrepreneurship in New York and Casablanca. Her work has been featured and shared in national and international exhibitions, conferences, and publications as well as awarded multiple times. She received a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and a Master’s degree in Marketing and Communications in addition to participating in the Exchange Program in Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She completed her MFA in Design & Visual Communications at the University of Florida where she taught design as an Instructor of Record and was the 2020 recipient of the Calvin A. VanderWerf Award for Excellence in Teaching.