Safiyeh Niknami
DDes Student
Teaching Assistant
in Graphic Design
snikna4@lsu.edu
MFA Louisiana State University
Safiyeh Niknami is a Doctor of Design (DDes) candidate in Cultural Preservation in LSU’s College of Art & Design. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Graphic Design from Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran, and later completed an MFA in Graphic Design at Louisiana State University. Alongside her doctoral studies, she teaches undergraduate design courses and works as a graphic designer within LSU’s Graphic Design Student Office (GDSO), bringing together research, teaching, and professional practice.
Her doctoral research focuses on cultural preservation at the intersection of design, emerging technology, and visual heritage. She focuses on Nastaliq calligraphy, a rule-based tradition tied to Persian poetry and cultural history, and examines why AI image generators often produce decorative “Nastaliq-like” marks that are visually unreadable. Treating this gap as both a technical bias and a cultural risk, she documents failure patterns and translates them into requirements for culturally informed datasets, metadata, and evaluation. Working with calligraphy masters, she develops ethical workflows for consent, attribution, and rights so living traditions aren’t reduced to a generic style. Her goal is a practical tools—dataset governance guidelines, training/fine-tuning recommendations, and a rubric for judging rule-faithful Nastaliq—that helps designers, educators, and cultural institutions use AI with integrity while expanding non-Latin representation in digital tools. She positions designers as cultural stewards who can shape AI futures through documentation, collaboration, and transparent standards.
Before moving to the United States, Niknami was actively engaged in Iran’s cultural and artistic community through festivals and recognized design work. She spent several consecutive years in professional practice, collaborating with public and private organizations across Iran, Australia, and Canada. These cross-cultural experiences shaped her sensitivity to how visual languages carry values, identity, and history and how design decisions shift when work moves between Eastern and Western contexts. she was honored for her participation and achievements in various cultural and artistic festivals in Iran and has also received multiple awards in design, graphic design, and app design in the U.S.