Connecting and Networking Across the Country 

With the spring semester in full swing, undergraduate, associate degree, and graduate students ventured beyond campus for opportunities to present and promote their work in professional settings. At conferences, festivals, and industry showcases, the next generation of writers, artists, and animators made meaningful connections, bringing their academic work to public audiences. 

Writers in the Wild

Students from Pratt’s MFA Writing program attended this year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Baltimore, where they tabled amongst hundreds of exhibitors at the bookfair, showcased exemplary work from the Pratt community, attended literary events, and connected with peers, publishers, and prospective students. 

At the bookfair, the Pratt Institute table featured titles from the Publication Collective, a group of MFA Writing students who collaborate to solicit, edit, design, and publish chapbooks alongside student publications like The Prattler and Ubiquitous, books by faculty, and book arts by Annie McGowan and Maya Sol Levy, both MFA Writing ’26. 

Levy’s interactive Fieldwork artist book project, for instance, invites viewers to participate by responding to prompts within its pages. “It was incredibly meaningful to share work I developed at Pratt with the wider literary community at AWP in Baltimore this year,” said Levy. “I presented a range of zines, pamphlets, and artists’ books—some of which have also been featured in Pratt’s library—to engaged and enthusiastic conference-goers. Many expressed genuine curiosity about Pratt’s Writing Department, and I appreciated the opportunity to introduce them to our unique program.” 

“Beyond the fair, we shared meals (fittingly, even dining on Pratt Street) and attended a range of panels and off-site literary events, including readings and gatherings hosted by independent presses like Nightboat, Birds LLC, Publishing Genius, and Red Hen Press,” said Claire Donato, assistant chair of writing. “AWP offered a meaningful opportunity to connect with a vibrant national writing community and to engage with prospective MFA students.”

Illustration in the City

In April, students in the Associate Degrees Department attended multiple arts and creative showcases in New York City. Through these events, they had the opportunity to experience tabling and selling their art in the form of prints, zines, and stickers while networking with other creatives. 

For the first time this year, students participated in the Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase (BICS) in Industry City, where they got hands-on experience showing their work to potential customers at a bustling art convention. Students also practiced handling the logistics of table inventory and revenue, giving them direct insight into the possibilities and practicalities of selling their art.

Game Arts Animators Take On Pax East

This March, graduating seniors in Game Arts (within the Department of Digital Arts and Animation) traveled to Boston to showcase their capstone works-in-process at Pax East, a multiday, globally recognized festival and conference that hosts over 60,000 attendees annually. The students presented ten projects—nine digital games and one physical game—over the course of four busy days. Students demonstrated their games for visitors and connected with professionals and peers in the industry. 

“Game conferences are an important and understated part of the game design community, a place for people from all ends of the game spectrum to come together and bond over their shared experience and love for all things games,” said Jolyne Aluko, BFA Game Arts ’26. “Conferences are a special sacred place of connection and collaboration, and it’s deeply beautiful.”

Their completed capstone projects will be shown at the Pratt Game Arts Senior Showcase at Wonderville Arcade in Brooklyn on May 17. 

Reflection Through Design

A team of graduate Information Experience Design (IXD) students, including Nisheta Gupta, Arnav Sharma, Ritika Ramesh, Krathish Prakash, and Qasim Malik, recently presented their project “Soma: Bio-Signal Ritual System for Embodied Well-Being” at the ACM Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) 2026 Conference, held at the University of Chicago, as part of the Student Design Challenge.

Soma is a “bio-signal ritual system” that explores how technology can support emotional well-being. Consisting of a soft, handheld device, a terrarium, and a companion app, the system is designed to create an experience that “integrates moments of awareness, regulation, and reflection throughout the day.”

“We were students presenting for the first time alongside established researchers, which was intimidating, but it also pushed us to really own what we’d built and why it mattered,” the team said. “Getting to present at TEI showed us that student work can be more than just class projects and can genuinely contribute to the field as a real research conversation.”