About

Photos by Dorian Tocker

Jillian is a designer, illustrator and artist, currently living and working out of her chosen home of Los Angeles.

But her time in and around the worlds of typography, pole dance + sensual movement, storytelling, and sex-positive spaces all inform the weaves and wefts of both her independent projects and client work. Her constant curiosity, experimentation, and dedication to understanding and challenging the boundaries of the structures we encounter in art, industry, and our communities cause the boundaries of her work to continuously shift + morph while always maintaining an identifiable energy that can only be described as particularly Human. She believes in the power of self-belief, transforming trauma into superpower through commonality, and honoring lived experience above all else. She is lit up by projects that speak to culture, community, relationships, identity and the natural world around us.

She is a proud product of South Jersey (the Philly part), VFW concerts, the early 2000s emo/screamo music scene, Livejournal, teenage angst and Jewish overnight camp (yes, like Wet Hot American Summer). She graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications but considers herself mostly self-taught. She spent much of her college and post-grad years booking + promoting concerts in Syracuse, Philly and NYC. She quit her first internship at Rolling Stone Magazine after just a few weeks + never talks about it. She learned about lettering + typography through Type Directors Club + Type @ Cooper programming but never officially participated in the program.

She spent most of her time in high school in leadership positions with her Jewish youth group while also learning sewing and staying in weekends mostly to experiment with new patterns. She is an only child with a single mother and (almost) no artist family, so when she couldn’t figure out how to submit a portfolio to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer in college, she scrapped the idea and chose her obvious second choice: International Relations. However, when she made an architecture friend freshman year who spent most of his time in a mystical land called “Studio,” she realized she needed to be there too and pursued her passions through photojournalism to graphic design, all the while bugging the music industry kids until they taught her how to book concerts.

Jillian’s friends + colleagues have described her as “the hungriest person they know.” But if New York consisted of gobbling life up, then Los Angeles consisted of spitting it all out.

Or rather peeling off layers. When Jillian relocated in 2014 due to a massive heartbreak and a deep exhaustion from the hustle of full time NYC agency life, she ventured out West on a ten-day solo road trip, armed with a fully-packed 2003 Hyundai Sante Fe. Upon her arrival, she found the radically feminine + fairly young community of pole dance, which was a stark contrast to the mostly masculine + long-established East Coast design community. She traded design friends for strippers + circus performers, began learning about all the ways bodies, sex + sex work are stigmatized, and dove deeply into a physical practice that allowed her to access herself in new ways. Pole dance + sensual, connected movement provided her with a body-based outlet to balance her intellectually-driven endeavors in building a freelance design and illustration practice, and it also gave her a sense of control in a way that her fledgling business couldn’t just yet.

In 2016, she began a month-long exploration of experimental art titled “The Good Rule,” which consisted of more expected type + illustration work, but ended up in photos of herself, some fully or partially nude. She began asking questions + having conversations about her body, relationships, identity and the world around her in new ways that revealed a need for her to build out new creative space in her life for these issues. So the first issue of Divine was born. It became a sacred space for her to build + explore the worlds of sex work, pleasure, porn, and societal issues around sex + bodies. It created many an existential crisis as she was simultaneously building her freelance design practice and working for big name corporate clients, such as Target, Apple, and Netflix. And she began sharing her experiences in holding this intersection of space.

In 2018, she was one of the initial members of Allright Collective, hosting a physical retail location for erotic art + ethically-made porn.

Divine was in a variety of independent retailers, including Quimby’s, Blue Stockings, Silver Sprocket and Skylight. She was on the West Coast zine fest circuit, and had just hosted Good Rule workshops, which taught an emotional artistic process, on the East Coast in Philly + Pittsburgh. And she got certified in Liquid Motion + began teaching sensual movement and floor work under the title of Sensual LA. But as she considered a fourth issue and her way forward with all of these efforts, she felt estranged from her art practice and knew she needed to put the brakes on everything in order to explore unencumbered.

It began, as it always has, with music lyrics.

Painting large, colorful words from Neko Case, The Velvet Teen, and La Dispute. And evolved into an exploration of her own words, poetry and story, once she was offered the opportunity for her first solo show at Nous Tous Gallery in September 2019, produced by Jeanne Heo. The months-long process of preparing for the show involved a reckoning of learning how to honor her own words. At the same time, she was beginning to work, for the first time in earnest, in movie + TV key art design which has proven to be a truly appropriate place for someone dedicated to communicating about story + emotion with art.

Today, her practice spans from movie poster + entertainment design, editorial illustration, typography, print and books to art devoted to texture, memory, story, and most recently, nature. As well as poetry, story, and holding ideological + activist space between the worlds of radical subculture and the more conservative, corporate world of design + the mainstream.

2022: Other Places Art Fair

Group show in Angel’s Gate Park, San Pedro, CA providing space for unconventional art.

2022: Brewery Artwalk, Le Garage

Group show at Le Garage for April 2022’s Brewery Artwalk.

2021: The Opposite of Death

Solo art show at Stay Fresh gallery in Syracuse, NY.

2019: A Bloodied Kind of Hope

Solo art show at Nous Tous Gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

2016-2018: Divine

Sex-positive art + story zine and independent erotic art shop.

2018: Sensual LA

Sensual movement + floor work classes.

2016-2017: The Good Rule

Experimental art collection and zine and accompanying art + story workshop.

2007-2008: The Bang Project

Music booking + promotion in Syracuse, NY.

Skill Set

→ Art direction
→ Key art + poster design
→ Entertainment design
→ Title design
→ Storyboarding
→ Music campaign & album art
→ Brand + communication design
→ Editorial illustration
→ Publication layout & design
→ Lettering & typography
→ Outdoor & environmental design

Awards

→ Communication Arts Typography 13
→ American Illustration 40
→ Society of Publication Designers 56

Features

→ Creative Boom
→ Queer Design Club
→ It’s Nice That
→ Hi-Res Podcast
→ Creative South Podcast
→ GoMedia Podcast
→ VoyageLA

Education

→ Visiting Artist, School of Visual Arts: Products of Design
→ Sex Work Panelist, Hofstra University: Inclusion Effort
→ Speaker,

Body Photos by Samia Zaidi

hello@jillianadel.com

©2021 Jillian Adel. All works contained on this page are property of its owner + may not be used or reproduced without consent.