Colleen Connolly

Colleen Connolly is a graphic designer and current Fulbright Scholar in Taipei, Taiwan. She received a Fulbright Arts Research Grant after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 2020.
Colleen specializes in design research, exhibition design, and museum studies. Her current research, the Gateway Project, advocates for increased access to multilingual exhibitions and resources for museum visitors. Multilingual design became the focus of her design work after Colleen received the Critical Language Scholarship in 2018 to travel to Dalian to study Mandarin Chinese. While in CLS’s language intensive program, she encountered a high language barrier in everyday life that made her more aware of signage and webpage inaccessibility. After CLS, working at museums such as Institute for Contemporary Art and Penn Museum solidified her interest in museum design. She is currently conversational in Mandarin and continues to take classes while in Taiwan. Her research touches on not only human-centered design practices, but also linguistic anthropology and museum practices.