This year The Malee Scholarship recognizes Purvi Kothari, Tatiana Lopez, Kotomi Morrill, Soniya Stella, Shrishti Vajpai and Junyi Zhu for their achievements and contributions to the type design industry. 

Purvi Kothari is a type designer from Rajsamand, Rajasthan, India. She earned her Bachelor's in Applied Art with a specialization in Typography and Lettering from Sir J.J. Institute of Art in Mumbai. Currently, she is working with Ek Type, where she creates fonts in Devanagari and Odia scripts. She has worked on two significant Devanagari font projects: Pravah and Naatak, both developed under Ek Type. She was selected to present at Typoday 2023, where she shared insights about her first font design project, Pravah—a Devanagari font designed for Sanskrit. Additionally, she has presented at TypeLab in both 2023 and 2024. Driven by her passion, she aims to document hand-painted lettering, which has been a significant source of inspiration and reference in her font design work.

Tatiana López is based and raised in El Salvador, Central America. She is a graphic andlettering designer, forever a type design enthusiast,starstruck by calligraphy. She has a Bachelors in Graphic Design. She was awarded the Beatrice Warde Scholarship, 2020 and had the opportunity thanks to a scholarship to study the post graduate program from Type West (online), 2022. During a short hiatus from university due to economic problems, she found the opportunity to apply for a mentor from the Alphabettes program, Petra Černe Oven(her mentor)changed her vision about design and the responsibility to share the knowledge.Following her love for type she became part of the type collective called Cabinete with Iván Castro & Jorge Orantes, through TypeCrit Crew found the blessing, encouragement and feedback from Fer Cozzi and were able to launch the idea, since there’s no support regarding typography or type design in their country.She hopes to continue her passion for letters by sharing her knowledge by teaching and pursuing her love for type design and pave the way to other female type designers in her country.

Kotomi Morrill is a graphic designer from Seattle, currently based in New York City. Letterforms drew her into graphic design, and from early on in her studies at the University of Washington, type became her primary passion within the field. After a few years working in branding, she attended TypeParis, where her appreciation for type design deepened. While her passion for type design remains strong, she is also interested in how type is used in larger systems. As these fields are inherently interconnected, she hopes to bring together type and graphic design in her practice. Born in Tokyo and a Japanese speaker, Kotomi also aspires to learn and produce typefaces in hiragana and katakana.

Soniya Stella is an Indian digital designer deeply in love with letterforms. She is a recent graphic design graduate from NID, Ahmedabad. Soniya’s story is rooted in faith, grit, and tenacity. There were 2 breakthrough pivots when she persevered in the morsel of a ‘maybe’ despite being on the verge of giving up on her creative ambitions, and they changed the course of her life. First one was in 2018 when she paved her way into design with National Rank 1 for All India NIFT Entrance Examination and an admission at NID – both India’s premier design institutes. It convinced her anxious father nearing retirement to let her drop out after 2 years of engineering and pursue a design degree. She was introduced to the world of letterforms in 2020 during a 2-week type design course in her sophomore year and that sparked her love for the subject. After many attempts to explore type, the pandemic steered her towards UX. Her second pivot was TypeParis 2023 – it was a surreal summer when the type tryst was rekindled and she fell in love even harder.

She embraces the enhanced empathy that her journey has instilled in her, and hopes to combine her core values, work experience in UX, and passion for type to build a niche in the intersection of typography and technology. Following her recent mentorship with Marie Boulanger, she is driven by her vision to be a designer who communicates faith by shaping words with type for empowering others.

Shrishti Vajpai is a graphic designer from New Delhi, India, specialising in branding and visual communication. After earning a BFA in Applied Arts from the College of Art Delhi in 2010, she gained experience in graphic design working with various design studios. In 2020, she completed a Master’s in Graphic Design (Focus on New Media) from IED-Firenze, graduating with a 110/110 Cum Laude. This led to an internship at Zetafonts Type Foundry, marking the beginning of her journey in typography with the design of her first Devanagari Script Typeface, Stadio Now Deva.

Shrishti continued collaborating with Zetafonts on an experimental Devanagari typeface called Heading Deva and contributed to the non-profit initiative, Fight For Kindness, through their TypeCampus division. She continues to work on the Fight For Kindness campaign remotely while also working as a freelance graphic designer. Typography is central to her work, which has always had a strong typographic emphasis.

Junyi Zhu is a Chinese type designer based in Baltimore, USA. She earned her MFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art. During her undergraduate thesis, she explored language as a reflection of her cultural identity struggles, navigating a predominantly English design education while feeling disconnected from her mother tongue. This sparked her interest in multilingual typefaces, driving her focus on bridging Chinese and English cultures through type design. After graduating, she completed the Type@Cooper Extended Program to further her professional education in type design and is currently interning at Mallika Type to deepen her practice in Chinese typeface design.