Meet Terresa Moses

We were lucky to catch up with Terresa Moses recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Terresa, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
My resilience is a character trait received from my ancestors and fostered by intentional work ethic inspired by the collective liberation of my people. My unique lived experience gives me particular skills to navigate the symptoms of white supremacy culture and create opportunities to center Black healing and joy through an abolitionist ideology.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a proud Black queer woman dedicated to the liberation of Black and brown communities through art and design. As a designer and illustrator, my work focuses primarily on race, identity, and social justice. I advocate for positive change in my community using creativity as tools of community activism and organizing like my solo intersectional exhibition, Umbra, and my community distro project, Stop Killing Black People. I intentionally create spaces and support initiatives in which members of the academic and broader community might challenge their own positionality in the context of oppression and understand through a cross-disciplinary lens how their personal experiences and biases affect their outcomes.

My work supports and is inspired by racial activist movements. I use design and illustration to communicate messaging that activates community and inspires positive change. My passion for design and racial justice has provided me with the opportunity to be a part of creative and innovative brands, projects, and campaigns from print, film, and interaction design. As the Creative Director of Blackbird Revolt— a social justice-based design studio— I use design innovation to further Black liberatory and abolitionist efforts. Because of the identities I hold and my scholarship within areas of identity, I am compelled to support projects which validate and uncover systemic and institutional racism through my creative work.

In continuing my anti-racist work within the academy, I am an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and the Director of Design Justice at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. I earned my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design and African American Studies and my Master of Fine Arts in Design Research and Anthropology from the University of North Texas. As a life-long learner, I am now pursuing my Doctorate of Philosophy in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto exploring how the movement for Black lives in Minneapolis might influence the curricular foundation of graphic design education. With Black liberation as a core mission in my academic work, the courses I create and teach engage students in anti-racism and anti-oppressive frameworks. As a community engaged scholar, my design research interests include; Project Naptural — which creates spaces to educate, connect, and empower Black women about their natural hair and self-identity— and Racism Untaught— a curriculum model that reveals ‘racialized’ design and helps students, educators, and organizations create anti-racist design approaches through the design research process. I have multiple publications including two books set to publish in October 2023 through MIT Press, Racism Untaught and An Anthology of Blackness.

I currently serve historically underrepresented and underinvested communities by planning Black liberatory protests, drafting abolitionist policy, and using design as a tool for mass communication and movement unification. I am currently a community partner and collaborator with Black Liberation Lab— an organization which co-creates solutions to support Black liberation.

Previously, I served on the executive committee of the Duluth NAACP as the 2nd Vice President, Young Adult Committee Chair, and Charter Advisor to the UMD NAACP Chapter. I also served on the board of the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, on the board of AIGA Minnesota as the Director of Diversity & Inclusion, and as a core team member of the African American Graphic Designers.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Three concepts that I use to frame my work are: disrupt, dismantle, and destroy.

Disruption refers to the introspective work of radically questioning and undoing racist ideologies that we’ve been socialized to perpetuate. It is so important that we constantly question societal norms and how we perpetuate those in our work and in our relationships.

Dismantle refers to the taking apart or and inspection of current systems of oppression in order to understanding the inner workings to create opportunities for new approaches. This concept centers education, building off the initial disruption and following through with taking apart the ways oppression affect the design of artifacts, systems, and experiences.

Destroy refers to the abolition of systems of violence and reimagining systems that support our collective liberation.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy DeGruy

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