There is nothing so enduring as the memories of shared stories.
“I remember lying side by side with my cousin on the roof of my grandmother’s house in Iran,” says Rahele Jomepour Bell (’15). “We would look up at the moon and the stars as my grandmother would tell us stories.”
When she wasn’t listening to tales, Bell was looking at the pictures in her grandmother’s books. For a young artist, these were early lessons.
“My grandmother would remind me that education had not always been for everyone,” Bell says. “So storytelling and books could be a powerful part of education.”
By the time she moved to the United States in 2011, Bell had begun developing her artistic eye at the University of Tehran and had illustrated several Iranian children’s books. In America, she found herself with both more artistic freedom and a much broader audience. She would keep her warm, detailed, and textured style, but was eager to stretch her talents to resonate with her new community. Bell took to the web, searching for degree programs in communication art — a form of art that focuses on the needs of audiences across mediums. It’s at this point that she discovered the MFA program at Iowa State.
“Being new to this country, the program was a community,” she says. “All the faculty encouraged me. As soon as they heard my ideas, they were so supportive.”
This fall, Bell returned to Iowa State to accept the 2025 Outstanding Young Professional Award from the College of Design. After receiving so much support and encouragement from Iowa State faculty, Bell holds a soft spot for the role the university played in her journey.
“I would happily have stayed a student forever,” she says with a smile.
Worlds removed from that rooftop where her grandmother told her stories, Bell has come into her own. To date, she has illustrated more than 20 picture books published across Iran, the United States, and Canada. Each book is carefully chosen to speak to childhood experiences: big emotions, the death of a loved one, or learning about new traditions and cultures. A mother herself, Bell strives to see storytelling through the eyes of her little girl.
“My hope is that, for my little readers, they can hold my books and they can get a sense that the book could be a part of their identity,” she says. “In communication art, the audience is more important than the creator. That’s why I love illustration.”