Ara Laylo is a designer, artist, musician, and educator whose practice is grounded in Honolulu and informed by more than twenty years of work at the intersection of visual communication, cultural identity, and community. Working across design, photography, film, installation, music, and pedagogy, she is interested in how creative practices shape the ways individuals and communities understand themselves, represent their histories, and imagine their futures.
Her artistic practice draws from her Filipina heritage, immigrant experience, and training as a graphic designer. As a visual communicator, she values clarity and accessibility; as an artist, she is interested in what emerges beyond clarity, ambiguity, symbolism, contradiction, and the layered meanings embedded within images and cultural narratives. Her work draws on utopian and transnational perspectives and engages questions of power, access, representation, and the conditions through which individuals and communities are permitted to define and pursue success.
Born in Laguna, Philippines, Laylo immigrated to the United States at age eleven after spending five years in Germany, and settled in Hawaiʻi at seventeen. She earned a BFA in Design from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she has taught Design and Typography as a lecturer since 2010. Her pedagogical practice brings critical design thinking into conversation with questions of narrative, medium, authorship, and the ethics of representation. More recently, she has incorporated artificial intelligence into both her teaching and creative practice as a means of examining authorship, intention, and the relationship between human decision-making and technological systems.
Alongside her studio and pedagogical work, Laylo has maintained a longstanding practice in creative strategy and cultural production. Her professional experience includes senior roles as VP Brand at NMG Network and Creative Lead at BoxJelly, where she contributed to Honolulu’s creative and civic ecosystem for more than a decade. These experiences have informed an interdisciplinary approach to creative practice in which design functions not only as a mode of visual communication, but also as a means of organizing ideas, shaping narratives, and creating spaces for cultural exchange.
Her civic practice is rooted in cultural stewardship and community building. She has served on the boards of Hawaiʻi Contemporary and the Chinatown Neighborhood Board, as well as the advisory committee of the Merwin Conservancy. She remains active in Honolulu’s cultural landscape as a curator, producer, and organizer, developing projects that range from cultural events and galas to more intimate gatherings and community-centered programs. Across these contexts, she is interested in curation and production as forms of cultural practice and ways of determining what is made visible, how people encounter one another, and which stories are given space.
Her commitment to Filipino diasporic history and representation is expressed through iJeepney.com, an online curriculum resource for students and educators focused on Filipino history and culture. In collaboration with Dr. Patricia Halagao and the Filipino Curriculum Project, Laylo led the platform’s redesign, bringing together visual communication, cultural research, and pedagogy. The project reflects a broader concern within her practice with how design can support cultural memory, expand representation, and make histories more accessible to the communities to whom they belong.
Music has been an integral part of Laylo’s practice for more than two decades. Beginning in 2001 with Avant Pop, she helped cultivate an independent live music culture in Honolulu, presenting national acts including Mates of State, The Thermals, and Deerhoof alongside local artists. In 2005, she served as entertainment manager for Ladyfest, further extending her engagement with community-centered cultural production. Music continues to function within her practice not simply as a medium, but as a way of understanding culture, collective experience, and the formation of community.
In 2022, Laylo wrote, directed, and co-produced her first film, KRONOS, a meditation on the boundaries between reality and perception. The film explores liminal spaces where memory, healing, and the natural world converge, using medicinal plants as both material and metaphor for transformation and repair. KRONOS extends her broader inquiry into memory, identity, solidarity, and the stories individuals and communities inherit, preserve, and choose to retell.
Across her work, Laylo is interested in the relationship between systems of representation and lived experience: how images, narratives, technologies, and cultural practices influence what becomes visible, what is remembered, and what is possible. Her current engagement with artificial intelligence extends this inquiry into questions of authorship, agency, and creative labor, positioning AI not simply as a tool for production but as a medium through which the boundaries of human and machine-generated creativity can be examined.
In 2006, Ara started a DIY promotions company called The Enterprise and promoted live concerts featuring Mirah, The Blow, Calvin Johnson, Jokers of the Scene, vitaminsforyou, Menomena and Of Montreal and curated first Friday art shows called The HAC (Honolulu Art Collective.)
Enterprise also booked the only regular independent music and local-band showcase called Kaleidoscope at thirtyninehotel and Next Door in the heart of Honolulu’s Chinatown.
In 2009, Ara founded a three piece electronic group called Clones of the Queen. COTQ has opened for Toro Y Moi, Menomena, Diplo, Little Dragon, Of Montreal, Warpaint and The Cure.
Ara has also been invited as Mr. X for Redbull Music Academy from 2010-2013.
☻ Designer • Producer • Educator ☻ 