With Pride Month now upon us, at Wolff Olins we want to spotlight some of our favourite LGBTQ+ artists, designers, creatives and thinkers. With over 1.5m LGBTQ+ people living in England and Wales alone, and an estimated 9m in the US, this year’s Pride celebrations promise to be bigger and better than ever.

Pride Month honours the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a turning point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the USA. In the UK, it’s now 20 years since Section 28 was repealed and Pride’s Rainbow Report, published at the end of 2022, shows a country that is fiercely proud to be inclusive. And this is in a world where there are still 60 countries with laws that effectively criminalise same-sex relationships.

It’s an honour for us to celebrate the many individuals, who through their work and creativity have been paving the way for greater equality, diversity and inclusivity in the world.

Meg Forsyth

Meg Forsyth is not only our legendary Design Director at Wolff Olins New York, but also an extraordinary painter, who explores the erotic, grotesque and mysterious realms of the natural world brought together by human interventions. 

She translates her compositions into large acrylic and oil paintings using components from various automatic drawings. Recurring motifs in Forsyth’s works conjure forms resembling aquatic corals, biomorphic beings, and bodily organs. These images are framed by line drawings of glossy manufactured technologies such as scalpels, syringes, and the human hand. Forsyth’s work serves as a reminder of our origins in nature in order to preserve it. 

Forsyth graduated from the Pratt Institute in NYC and later received her Master’s degree from Werkplaats Typografie (ArtEZ) in 2016. In 2019 she was nominated for the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting. 

Alok Vaid Menon

Internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian and public speaker Alok works as a mixed media artist to explore themes of trauma, belonging and the human condition. 

They are the author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and Your Wound/My Garden (2021) and the creator of #DeGenderFashion - an initiative to degender fashion and beauty industries. In recognition of their work, they have been honoured as the inaugural LGBTQ Scholar in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and awarded a GLAAD Media Award and Stonewall Foundation Visionary Award. 

Over the past decade, they have toured in more than 40 countries with a show that has been described as "provocative and powerful". On-screen, they will make their feature film debut in Absolute Dominion opposite Patton Oswalt. On TV, they have previously appeared on Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne, PRIDE: To Be Seen – A Soul of A Nation and Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.

Arinze Ifeakandu

Arinze Ifeakandu is winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for US and Canada and a Story Prize Spotlight Award. A Kirkus and LAMBDA finalist, Ifeakandu was awarded one of the world’s largest literary prizes for young writers – the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – for his ‘exhilarating’ debut God’s Children Are Little Broken Things; a stunning short fiction collection, whose nine stories simmer with loneliness and love, and depict what it means to be gay in contemporary Nigeria.

Ifeakandu’s writing chronicles the ups and downs of complicated lives. His sensitive observations of the experience of queer Nigerians and the idea of ideal kinds of love.

Described as ‘gorgeous…full of subtlety, wisdom and heart’ by Sarah Waters, ‘quietly transgressive’ by Damon Galgut and awarded the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things has established 28-year-old Ifeakandu as a vital new voice in literary fiction.

Grace Francis

Global Chief Creative and Design Officer at WONGDOODY, Grace Francis is one of the only trans non-binary industry leaders. They advocate for intersectional inclusivity in the creative industries and founded the mentorship program called elsewherestudio, which uses design thinking to help people make better decisions when life brings about big changes. 

Francis is an occasional lecturer at Hyper Island and University of the Arts London and Jury President of Cannes Lions 2023 Innovation Awards. They are always in demand as a speaker and guest lecturer, Francis has also appeared on the judging panels for The One Show, Creative Review Annual and BIMA, among others.

Wilfrid Wood 

Wilfrid Wood is a London-based sculptor, model maker and illustrator. Trained in graphics at Central St Martins, he then landed a job building latex heads for satirical TV programme, Spitting Image. From here he embarked on a creative journey making recognisable 3D sculpted and 2D portraits. 

Wood’s artistic career has produced many charismatic and quirky sculptures that have been exhibited all over the world. He has created likenesses of a number of famous faces including, Justin Beiber, David Bowie, Paul McCartney,Wayne Rooney and Mark Zuckerberg, and our very own Senior Motion Designer Étienne Godiard! His work has been exhibited across the world from Arizona to Seoul.

Wood’s portraits are both charming and satirical, some are an intimate portrait of people he has met and others of famous faces in caricature. He finds inspiration in the variety found in people’s faces and bodies. 

Evan Ifekoya  

Evan Ifekoya is a multidisciplinary artist who works with text, sound and video. Their work explores the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound. It has a focus on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. 

Ifekoya’s ongoing project, ‘A Score, A Groove, A Phantom’, investigates archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment. 

Previously an Art Foundation Fellow in Live Art, their work has been presented internationally in Edinburgh, Cambridgeshire, London, Glasgow, Cape Town and Bristol with performances at the Serpentine Galleries and Whitstable Biennale. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network 11. 

Cassils

Cassils is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Their art contemplates the histories of LGBTQ+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performances are a form of social sculpture, drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations. 

Cassils has had solo exhibitions around the world in cities including Manchester, Perth, NYC, Boston and Eindhoven. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art and gay male aesthetics. 

They have received a number of prizes and fellowship positions including a Fleck Residency at Banff, Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, Museum of Transgender Hirstory award and numerous fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Art Gallery of Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum. 

Guiselle Milanés 

Guiselle Milanés creates sleek and futuristic contemporary interior and product design. The Costa Rican designer’s inspiration comes from a desire to create furniture that can be seen as sculptural while remaining practical and easy to use daily. 

Milanés’ work with architecture and furniture studio Santa Furia is characterised by a trendless approach to colour. They turn to deep greens alongside eye-popping reds. They push to be aware of their design processes by looking at people, places and experiences, all of which make their work stand out as a personal and observed statement. 

Gilbert & George

Collaborative art duo Gilbert & George have been working together to make performance and multiple-medium art - always self-referred to as sculpture - since the 1960s. Their ‘Art for All’ approach aims to be relevant outside an elite art world. 

The duo has achieved international acclaim, with extensive solo shows around the world, being granted a number of honorary doctorates and winning the Turner Prize in 1986. In 2023, Gilbert & George opened their own gallery dedicated to their own work, established not far from where they have lived and breathed their art since 1968. Their 2007 retrospective at Tate Modern was the largest of any living artists in this institution.