Graphic Designer / Educator / Career Coach / Community Advocate / Based in Los Angeles
Narrative Bio
Andrew Kutchera’s design experience ranges from typography and identities and to print publications and visual strategy. Kutchera consults on visual branding and ephemera for small businesses, museums, public agencies, and nonprofits. Kutchera has taught at five institutions of higher education in Los Angeles. In his longest role, he was Senior Lecturer at University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design, where he was a faculty member for nearly 10 years.
Kutchera has also been actively involved in cultural programming, where he has organized and curated dozens of events for Adobe and AIGA Los Angeles. In the latter role, he served as Programming Director and DEI Director, producing high-profile events, soliciting donations, and spearheading relationships with new venues. Additionally, he mentored new board members, collaborated with external partners, and facilitated professional relationships within the multi-faceted design communities in the region.
In 2023, he started as Director of Partnerships for the LA Design Festival, where he raised money and established creative synergies between the disparate individuals and groups, across a range of design disciplines, both digital and analog.
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In other achievements, Kutchera won Second Place for his design of the catalogue Faces of a Fish Empire in the 2018 International Design Awards (IDA), a competition that drew more than 3,100 submissions from 95 countries.
In 2015, Kutchera was selected as a panelist for a discussion of The Graphic Art of Ikko Tanaka, an exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. In 2013, he was a featured speaker at AIGA’s San Francisco Design Week, and additionally he was awarded Outstanding Instructor in the Arts at UCLA Extension in 2009.
In an ongoing role, Kutchera is an Adobe Education Leader, where he meets with Adobe teams and then generates new ways of teaching software to share with design educators around the world.
Kutchera is actively involved in other consulting and creative pursuits. He has a side business helping recent graduates and seasoned professionals rewrite and redesign their resumes. He also has a Tarot business, which you can read about here. And as a photographer, Kutchera explores residential neighborhoods, vintage cars, and the afternoon light of Southern California, which you can see on his Instagram.
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Kutchera earned his BA in Art History and Spanish from Lawrence University and his MFA in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts.