Frida Larios shares her journey to find her Mayan culture through her work as a designer. As a part of her accomplishments she has created a new mayan language through hieroglyphics.  Frida shows us how this tells stories.

Frida is from El Salvador (of Maya-pipil and Spanish heritage), a small and impoverished country in Central America with deep ethnic and social identity crisis. In 2004, these overwhelming historical tensions inspired her to found a cultural movement called New Maya Language, and while creating it, to find her own indigeneity. Larios’s unique system re-codifies a small part of the Maya mythic narrative through new graphic form. Her methodology speaks with and for today’s indigenous communities by borrowing directly from the logo-graphic principles of ancestral Maya scribes. For nearly 15 years she has dialogued diverse Mesoamerican narratives for children, youth and designers through exhibitions, workshops, installations, books, artworks, and textiles; around the world.

Larios is the Indigenous Advisory Chair for the International Indigenous Design Network (INDIGO) at the International Council of Design (Canada) and Deakin University (Australia). She co-founded  Indigenous Design Collective (Washington, D.C.), an organization that partners with the Smithsonian Latino Center for Day of the Dead celebrations in the U.S. Larios is currently an Adjunct Professor in Art and Design at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., where she lives. She holds a MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London.