About
Letra Muerta Inc.

An award-winning design studio and archive center directed by Faride Mereb and Oriana Nuzzi.

After ten years of designing and publishing, Letra Muerta now functions as a hybrid studio for design, historical preservation, workshops, and collection development. Originally founded in 2014 as a publishing house in Venezuela, Letra Muerta opened as a physical space in New York City in 2022.

Projects are selected and developed with an emphasis on works in translation and multilingual content, with special attention to typography and cultural awareness.

Some social projects we support: Feria del libro independiente (Caracas, Venezuela), Libreria Ítaca (Medellín, Colombia), Objetual (online archive), and Red Tipográfica. Our reading room and reference library are open by appointment.

Estate +
Licensing

Hanni Ossott
Salvador Garmendia
Miyó Vestrini
Ronald Pizzoferrato
John Vasquez Mejias
Waleska Belisario
Víctor Viano

Selected
Collabs

Booklyn
Interference Archive
Center for Book Arts
Kenning Editions
Black Mass
The Met
The Arm
Miriam Gallery
MoMA
Archivo Foto Urbana
Kelli Anderson
Erika Morillo
La Poeteca
The P.I.T
Patio Tropical

Our Services

Editorial design
Exhibition design
Pre-press for books + exhibits
Archival + curatorial services
Special editions + dummy making
Collection development
Workshops + programming

Archives are
essential in design.

Through archives, we set a foundation for our design practice, drawing from historical documents, materials, imagery, and narratives to contextualize and inform our visual language.

Our publications are held by Cornell University, Columbia University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, the National Library of Venezuela, and by other institutions and private collections around the world.

Meet the NYC team

Besides the studio team below, we continue to collaborate with people nationally and internationally who also make our projects possible.

Samoel González | Photographer | Designer, maker, and photographer. His work has been included in multiple publications and group exhibitions. He has worked at startups in different roles, and currently works as an artist assistant for Studio Diana Lopez, creating installations internationally.

Keyla Benitez | Archivist | Historian and archivist from Houston, Texas, and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College (History and Latin American Studies). Her research interests include Latin American memory and diaspora and 19th to 21st century social movements. Their undergraduate thesis examines the lynching of Mexican women in Texas.

Faride Mereb | Founder | Venezuelan art director, book designer, and researcher living and working in New York City. She has won numerous awards, including the 2024 Grand Prix for best book design in the Latin American Design Awards, and best design studio (Venezuela). In 2022, she won a 10X10 research grant for work on photobooks by women, supporting her formative research on Karmele Leizaola (1929–2021), Venezuela’s first known woman graphic designer. Mereb was a visiting scholar at Columbia (2021–2022) and a guest professor at Yale (Fall 2024). She is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Printing History Association.

Oriana Nuzzi | Co-director | Designer, born in Maracaibo, Venezuela; currently lives and works in New York City. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in design, graduating with honors from LUZ in 2019. In addition to taking courses on photography and visual arts, she participated in several group exhibitions, such as Cuerpo en cuestión (with Art Nexus) and Prácticas vs. teoréticas. In 2024, she was certified in “diseño y producción tipográfica” by the program developed by Tipografilia Estudios (Mexico City), and won second place in the Rafael Cadenas Poetry competition (Venezuela) the same year with her “Araya.” As part of her research on identity, she is currently developing a text typeface called Maracaibo.