Tyler J. Kliem graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts & Sciences and Stuart Weitzman School of Design in 2024, where he pursued dual B.A.s in Comparative Literature and Design respectively. Previously, he sought academic coursework in Yiddish at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages at the University of Oxford. His areas of specialization include editorial design; literary translation; the avant-garde; narrative history; typography; Yiddish art & design; Yiddish language, literature, and culture; and Yiddish print culture.

For his prodigious study of Yiddish and the arts at Penn, Kliem was awarded The Workers Circle/Der Arbeter Ring Prize from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures (2021), the Pincus Fellowship from Penn Hillel (2021), the Charlotte Yiddish Institute Book Prize from the Jewish Studies Program (2021, 2022), the Philip E. Goldfein Scholarship Award from the Jewish Studies Program (2022), the RealArts@Penn Prize from the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (2023), the Louis Schwartz and Elaine Friedman Memorial Fund Award from the Jewish Studies Program (2023), and a U.S. Fulbright Program grant for continued Yiddish avant-garde research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (2024–2025).

In the summer of 2023, Kliem conducted an artist-in-residence program at The Jewish Museum, in addition to a research assistantship at the Princeton Geniza Lab. In the summer of 2022, he was a digital librarian intern at the Yiddish Book Center, where he also studied Yiddish at an intermediate level.

With a concentration in (trans)national literatures in the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, Kliem has researched the Yiddish avant-garde of 1920s Eastern Europe—specifically its Jewish aesthetics and migration to the intellectual centers of Berlin and Paris—with Dr. Kathryn Hellerstein of the Jewish Studies Program. In 2022, he was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship with the Wolf Humanities Center to conduct this work, culminating in research presentations at the 2022–2023 Wolf Humanities Forum Research Conference and the 2022–2023 Jewish Studies Program Honors Research Symposium. His translations, written pieces, and artwork have hitherto appeared in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, the University of California, Berkeley’s Vagabond Multilingual Journal, Verklempt!, and Poet's Row. In 2023, Kliem independently designed and published a fanzine of Holocaust survivor Rywka Braun-Nyman z”l’s poetry, titled “Lost Homeland: Poems of Pain.” During his internship with the Jewish Museum, Kliem also independently published and designed a fanzine of poetry from Malka Locker z”l, titled “Cities: Selected Poems.” Kliem also created artwork for the Philomathean Society’s spring 2023 exhibition, “The Opium Diaries: A Jean Cocteau Retrospective,” which received certain praise from Dr. Cornel West, scholar and candidate for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

At Penn, Kliem made involvements in 34th Street Magazine and The Daily Pennsylvanian (“The DP”) as Design Editor on the 138th Board of Editors and Managers, where he won an Honorable Mention for the Pinnacle Award in Best Newspaper Sports Page/Spread Design at the 2022 National College Media Convention. Between 2022 and 2023, he served as the DP’s inaugural Senior Crosswords Editor with the support of an Eric Jacobs Scholarship Award. In the spring of 2023, Kliem began creative direction and editorial design for The Woodlands Magazine, which was awarded a 2023 Student Grant Award from The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. Kliem was also an active member in: the Delta Zeta chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, an international service fraternity, where he served in various leadership capacities; and The Excelano Project, Penn's spoken word poetry collective.

In his senior year, Kliem conducted an undergraduate design thesis on modern Yiddish typography and type revival, which was awarded the Samuel and Esther Goldin Endowment Award for best thesis in Jewish studies. He presented this work at the 2024 Hebrew Type Symposium in Minneapolis, as well as at the 2024 Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference. He joined New Voices Magazine and Ayin Press as a 2023–2024 Jewish Media Fellow. He was also a Research Peer Advisor (RPA) under the auspices of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

Since his first day at Penn, Kliem had been a welcoming student worker in the Department of English’s office, for which he received the 2022 Best Undergraduate Student Service Award. He was the academic advisee of Dr. Julia Alekseyeva, current Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies.