JAJAJA: The Joy of Creating from Within

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, Poster House presents a panel discussion exploring how one’s cultural background, lived experience, and memory can inform their creative practice.

Hosted by artist and designer Zipeng Zhu, this conversation will bring together Abraham Lule, Daniela Castiblanco, Isabel Urbina Peña, and Carlos Bocai to reflect on what it means to make deeply personal work. Together, the panelists will consider how heritage and identity can shape visual language, as well as how humor, joy, and play manifest in the creative process.

This program is presented by Poster House’s CMYK Council, the museum’s BIPOC advisory board that works to ensure the museum is accessible to communities of color.

Based in Brooklyn, Mexican designer Abraham Lule has carved out a distinctive niche with his flamboyant yet intentional typography. He’s a highly decorated TDC member, a two-time Pentawards winner, and has judged multiple design competitions throughout his career. Clients include Kraft-Heinz, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, META, and many boutique distilleries and brands in the hospitality industry around the world. In 2025, he started a new project: Article of Kind, a design practice intended to restore the arts to the commercial arts.

Daniela Castiblanco is a Colombian creative director, designer, and creative mentor based in New York. She is the founder of Gracias Company, an independent creative studio, and Common Space, a platform that brings creatives together to share ideas, collaborate, and build community. Her work moves across brand identity, art direction, culture, and visual storytelling, and she loves to turn ideas into things that people can connect with and remember. She also mentors creatives, helping them gain clarity about their work, talk about what they do, and find new ways to put it out into the world.

Isabel Urbina Peña is an art director and multidisciplinary artist from Venezuela based in Brooklyn. Her work spans mediums and mainly revolves around letters and books. She has worked for publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins), museums (the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Historical), media (The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Refinery 29, Buzzfeed), and tech (Apple, Etsy, Skillshare). In her spare time, she teaches typography at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York, hosts occasional workshops, speaks at conferences in the United States and abroad, and makes art and artist’s books.  

Carlos Bocai is a Brazilian graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn. He is currently a design director at Base NY and previously worked at JKR, &Walsh, and Gretel. Together with Julia B. Aguiar, he teaches the class Decoding Identities at the online school Aprender Design. His work has earned recognition from the Type Directors Club, multiple editions of the Latin American Design Awards, and The One Club for Creativity. Carlos was nominated a Young Gun 22 by The One Club for Creativity and was included on the 2025 Most Popular Graphic Designers Hotlist by Creative Boom.

Accessibility Note: Masks are available free of charge at the museum. Assistive listening devices and stools are available. ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) is also available upon request. Please contact access@posterhouse.org or (914) 295-2387 to request interpretation services and to address any other accessibility needs. For other event-related questions, please contact events@posterhouse.org.