Pouya Ahmadi is designer, educator, and researcher based in Chicago.
Jason Alejandro is a Puerto Rican graphic designer and educator. He is currently Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the College of New Jersey. His work examines, addresses, and questions aspects of cultural identity, professional practice and critical pedagogy through research, making, and writing. Jason has produced award-winning work for brands, agencies, and organizations—as well as publishers, and institutions of higher education. His work has been exhibited in New York City, Boston, Berlin, Minneapolis and Mexico City. He has previously taught at Rutgers University, Lehigh University, Kean University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Jason received his MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Recently graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, Alex Anderson received an MFA in Ceramics in 2018 after earning a Fulbright Grant in affiliation with the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2015. His work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally and across the United States, with an emphasis on Southern California. Select works from Anderson’s recent solo exhibition, Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains, at Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles, are on view through August 22, 2020. Anderson is represented by Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles and Palm Beach.
Sharon Arnold (she/they) is an independent scholar, writer, and educator working in critical theory and cultural criticism. In 2009 they launched an online project turned physical exhibition space, Bridge Productions, which focused on collaborative process-based work, talks, and projects by artists, curators, writers, and performers through various modes of storytelling through online exhibitions, digital residencies, and social media coverage; as well as periodic curatorial projects, in-print publications, and public programming. They are currently working on various projects which tether multiple intersections of art, food, culture, and folklore which are regularly published on their website, Dimensions Variable.
Leighton Beaman is a designer, researcher, writer and educator. His work is focused on material affects and procedural artifacts in our collective constructed environment. In addition to leading Alterior Office, Leighton is Co-founder of the design non-profit GA Collaborative, which works with vulnerable and underrepresented communities internationally. Leighton is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and is the Associate Director of the Open Systems Lab, a research institute focused on design + technology. He also teaches, on occasion, at the Rhode Island School of Design and is a regular contributor to Architectural Record.
Zaneta Hong is an Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, where she teaches courses on material ecologies, landscape technologies and sustainable practices. Her work has been recognized by the Graham Foundation and Environmental Design Research Association; and she was recently awarded the 2018-19 Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. In addition to teaching, Zaneta is the Co-Director of Alterior Office and a Research + Design Consultant for GA Collaborative.
Jonas Becker is an interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His projects explore the intersection of belief, power, and landscape with a focus on the connection between rural and urban communities. He works primarily in lens-based media, as well as performance. Recent exhibitions include The MCA Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Actual Size gallery, and the Craft & Folk Art Museum. His work is featured in the New Museum anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and CAM Houston’s publication Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System.
As designers and educators, we are engaged in an antidisciplinary creative practice that operates at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape and sound to discover ideas that stimulate ecologically sensitive and culturally relevant design interventions. We engage in projects of all media and scales, including but not limited to drawing, collage, photography, video, sound, sculpture, architecture and landscape. We believe in contextually driven methods of design where experiments embody a unique sense of fantastical pragmatism; are playful and fun, yet intentional and deeply rooted in rigorous research.
Andy Campbell is an art historian, critic, and curator whose work examines the historical and contemporary conjunctions of archives and U.S. queer communities. He is the author of Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2020) as well as Queer X Design: 50 Years of Signs, Symbols, Banners, Logos, and Graphic Art of LGBTQ (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2019). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at USC-Roski School of Art and Design.
He is a member of the 45 Library Collective.
Juliette Cezzar is a designer, educator, and author based in New York City. She is a tenured Associate Professor of Communication Design. She directed the BFA Communication Design and BFA Design & Technology programs from 2011-14.
She is a member of the 45 Library Collective.
Adriana Corral’s subjects are framed by human rights abuses, memory and erased historical narratives. Corral’s work is rooted by her experiences from her birthplace of El Paso, Texas in which she examines the nuances of immigration, citizenship, economic trade, labor, public health, and policies from a local to national and international level.
Beatriz Cortez (b. El Salvador) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory in the aftermath of war, migration, and imaginaries of the future. Cortez has received the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches at California State University, Northridge.
Lily Cox-Richard’s work engages cultural and material histories of vernacular forms and systems, probing questions of value, labor, and stewardship. LCR lives and works in Richmond, VA, and is an Assistant Professor in the Art Foundation Program and Sculpture + Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Adriana Cuellar and Marcel Sanchez are co-founders of CRO studio, a collaborative research and architecture firm established at the border region of Tijuana / San Diego. With a strong social impact agenda, CRO studio has been engaged with community projects reconfiguring urban dynamics, involved from social housing prototypes and community centers to religious institutional projects and private developments on both sides of the border. Their work seeks to orchestrate civic engagements that question environmental values while exploring material aesthetics, programmatic inventions, and spatial appropriations that re-imagine the everyday challenges of urban life.
Mira Dayal is an artist, critic, and editor based in New York. Her studio work often involves laborious play with language, material, and site. She teaches at the International Center of Photography, writes for Artforum, and is currently editing a book about art criticism as a feminist tool.
Double Happiness is a collaboration between Nerea Feliz and Joyce Hwang. Their creative practice focuses on research and design at multiple scales, with interests in the intersections of interior design, architecture, urbanism, and ecology. Collectively, they are registered architects in Spain, the UK, and New York State. Feliz is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, and directs Nerea Feliz Studio. Hwang is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair at the University at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning, and directs Ants of the Prairie.
Allan Espiritu is a Philadelphia based graphic designer, artist and educator. Espiritu received his BA in graphic design from Rutgers University, Camden Campus and his MFA in graphic design from Yale University, School of Art. He is the founder of GDLOFT, a collaborative design studio based in Philadelphia. His art and graphic works has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States and internationally.
Miguel Alquezada is a designer and artist based in the Philadelphia area. He is currently a junior designer at GDLOFT , a studio in Philadelphia and is a recent graduate of Rutgers University, Camden.
Patricia Fernández and Ian James are artists working and living in Los Angeles. Their past collaborative practices include a field research aspect as well as an installation and object-making practice. Their works emerge from an interest in histories, time and textures contained within landscape. James is currently working on a Radio Station for Planetary Healing (Healing Light Comfort Zone) that will be broadcast from Emma Gray HQ in Venice and Joshua Tree, CA. Fernández has been creating a series of hand-carved clocks and time-keeping devices for 2020, to be exhibited at Commonwealth & Council.
Lari Garcia is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Their work is indebted to ancestral spirits, storytellers, and practitioners mining memory out of colonization. With support of cultural contact points, historical battlegrounds and land stewardship. They are currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, Sculpture + Extended Media.
Born in Ukraine in early 80s. Slightly touched by the radiation fallout of Chernobyl. Lived through the collapse of the USSR. Otherwise experienced a normal Soviet childhood playing basketball in the Summers and violin during the year. Emigrated to Connecticut in 97. Received a BFA in Communication Design from University of Connecticut in 2001. Received an MFA in Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2011. Currently on faculty at University of Wisconsin-Stout School of Art and Design in Department of Design. A practicing designer working for commercial as well as cultural in Minneapolis and in other places.
Suzy González is an artist, curator, zinester, and educator based in San Antonio, TX. She has exhibited, attended residencies, and curated exhibits across the country. She is a 2018 alum of the NALAC Leadership Institute, and a 2019 alum of the Intercultural Leadership Institute and NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. She is half of the collective Dos Mestizx, she co-publishes Yes, Ma’am zine, and co-organizes the San Anto Zine Fest. Suzy holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BFA from Texas State University, and is an adjunct professor at Our Lady of the Lake University.
Brendan Griffiths is a graphic designer, programmer, and educator living and working in New York City. He is a partner in the design practice Zut Alors! where he works with a range of clients including Bloomberg View, Creative Time, Deitch Projects, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Condé Nast, Performa, and Socrates Sculpture Park. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Interaction Design and Director of the MPS Communication Design program at Parsons School of Design.
He is a member of the 45 Library Collective.
I am a creative technologist and educator who loves the internet but is equally terrified by it.
I use technology to critique technology. My speculative practice explores the physical, cultural, and social ramifications of digital experiences and the role technology plays in shaping our everyday realities. I make Thick Interfaces. These are tools, devices, software, artifacts, websites, and videos that agitate the digital facade and reveal the complexity existing underneath the thin veneer of our devices.
I received his BARCH from Virginia Tech and an MFA from RISD. I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Cindy Hwang is an artist and designer whose practice explores the relationship between politics and aesthetics, using language and commonplace forms to complicate assumptions about the present. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2020.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops and automation. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.
Diane Lee is a San José-based graphic designer and educator. She is an Assistant Professor at San José State University and collaborates with non-profits, small businesses, independent artists, and cultural institutions on design-, writing-, and publishing-related projects.
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and Seoul.
Maia Lorian is an actor, creator, native New Yorker, and artistic director of A Presidential Parody. Her latest ad takeover “Hail Spray Tan”, offers a snapshot into the dystopian nightmare we’re presently living. In a nation placing higher value on the American dollar over the American life, A Presidential Parody felt it was time to release an ad campaign that reflects Trump’s “all American” values.
Demar Matthew is a Los Angeles based architectural designer,theorist, and creative. Demar is the founder and Principal of OffTop Design. He also works with A+D Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles as curator/exhibitions associate. Born in Moreno Valley, CA Demar received his Bachelor’s from HBCU Lincoln University of PA, and his Master’s of architecture at Woodbury University where he was awarded the Graduate Thesis Prize for his project Black Architecture: Unearthing the Black Aesthetic. He believes that architecture Demar believes architecture and good design should not only be for the privileged. Every community deserves to be proud of the built environment around them, and the built environment around them should be based on the cultures of the people who live there; regardless of income, race, and gender.
Born in 1985 in San Antonio, TX, Menchaca received his BFA from Texas State University in 2011, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), Vermont Studio Center (VT), The Wassaic Project (NY), The Segura Arts Studio (IN), and The Studios at MASS MoCA (MA). Exhibitions include The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), The McNay Art Museum (TX), The Davis Museum (MA), North Carolina Museum of Art (NC), The Chrysler Museum of Art (VA), The Gilcrease Museum (OK), The Contemporary Austin (TX), and the IPCNY (NY). He was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center from 2015 - 2016 in Provincetown, MA, and is a recipient of the 2018 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Fund for the Arts Grant. Menchaca lives and works in San Antonio, TX.
Aleksandr Mergold is a partner at Austin+Mergold, an architecture, landscape, and design practice, a testing ground for his inquiry into the contemporary interpretation of spolia. This research also continues at Cornell University where Mergold teaches architecture. Prior to the practice and the teaching, Mergold worked at Pentagram in New York on a variety of architecture and design projects. A third-generation architect, Aleksandr was born in the ancient city of Tashkent, that contains simultaneous traces of the Great Silk Road, colonial conquests, and a socialist planned economy.
Adam Miller is the 2019 and 2020 Race & Gender in the Built Environment Fellow at UT Austin’s School of Architecture. Adam is also the founding member of Pneu-Stars, a collaborative design group which produces stage designs and installations. Adam’s research investigates the relationship between taste, power, and identity via the lens of the queer body and queer architecture. Adam asks: How does architectural style confer an aesthetic value system; and how can we come to recognize and reappropriate its tools for proposing alternative ways of seeing, making, and identification, to better develop design that takes marginalized perspectives into account?
Manuel Miranda is a graphic designer and educator who works on graphic identities, websites, publications, signage, and exhibitions. He is a graphic design critic at the Yale School of Art, a mayoral appointee on the NYC Public Design Commission, and was previously vice-president of AIGA New York. Before starting his studio, he was a designer at Brand Integration Group at Ogilvy, and a design director at 2×4. He earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Design from the Yale School of Art, and a Bachelor of Arts with a focus in literature and linguistics from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.
Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a nonbinary Polish-born multidisciplinary artist working primarily in performance and video. Their practice weaves surrealist narrative through video and drag-inflected performance to explore labour and loss with a particular investment in these themes as a part of radical queer and trans cultural production.
Forever often works collaboratively with sound artist Gambletron. In their ongoing performance, video and sounds series, the duo (miss)uses a variety of digital and analog communications technologies to address issues of place-making and access in Queer and Diasporic community contexts.
Forever is a 2020 MFA Graduate from USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Open Walls is a studio founded on the principle of creating moments of access for creatives in the visual arts and design world. The studio was founded by Edlin G. Lopez and Albert Orozco who envision creating a platform that challenges current issues in our societies. Through an intersectional use of cultural art and environmental design, they curate spatial stories that reimagine the narrative of historically dispossessed communities.
Tuan Quoc Pham (he/him) weaves in and out of graphic design looking for the poetic forms of the everyday. He is interested in meditative ways of making, familiar technologies, publishing, and magical realism.
Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello are the alchemist and architects behind the Oakland-based studio Rael San Fratello and the make-tank Emerging Objects. Wired magazine writes of their innovations, “while others busy themselves trying to prove that it’s possible to 3-D print a house, Rael and San Fratello are occupied with trying to design one people would actually want to live in”. They are rethinking the way sensuous and sustainable objects and buildings can be made from the ground up. They also speculate about the social agency of design, particularly along the borderlands between the USA and Mexico. You can see their models, designs and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Gina Reichert is an artist, architect, and community developer. Her practice is rooted in developing strategies for self-initiated projects in her immediate Detroit neighborhood, defining opportunity in overlooked spaces and using the resources at hand. She has worked for architecture firms and community organizations in Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York and Detroit, with M.Arch degrees from Cranbrook Art Academy and Tulane University. Reichert and husband, Mitch Cope, practiced collaboratively as Design 99 for a decade. In 2009, they founded Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization that integrates contemporary art and design into the daily life of the diverse neighborhood where they live and work.
Ozayr Saloojee is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa, Canada. He also serves as the co-director of the Carleton Urban Research Lab which focuses and is cross appointed faculty at the Institute for African Studies. His teaching and research explores question of counter-colonial urbanisms, , infrastructure contested geographies and spatial politics. He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer. The central theme in recent paintings is the experience of living in a moment of radical inequality, austerity, accelerated time, and the collapse of history, under the regime of a malevolently ignorant despot. set against the powerful pull of older notions of time, craft, and visual pleasure. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism and a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking. Schor was co-editor with fellow painter Susan Bee of the journal and thirty-year editorial project M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Schor is represented by Lyles & King Gallery in New York City. She is a recipient of the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award for her work as a feminist painter, art historian and critic. She is represented by Lyles & King Gallery in New York.
Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was included in the recent exhibition “Art & Space” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and has been included in exhibitions such as “The More Things Change”, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Contemplating the Void" and “The Shapes of Space”, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, “Light and Landscape”, Storm King Art Center, and “Living Color”, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and “Pattern: Follow the Rules” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 1999 and 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Guggenheim Bilbao, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN.
Igor Siddiqui is an architect, writer, and design educator based in Austin, Texas and Paris, France. His creative scholarship, research, and practice explore various relationships between design innovation and public engagement. He holds the appointment of Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.
He is a member of the 45 Library Collective.
Susan Silton is based in Los Angeles. Her interdisciplinary projects respond to resonant political and social landscapes, often through poetic combinations of humor, discomfort, subterfuge and unabashed beauty. These projects mine the complexities of subjectivity and subject positions in a range of media, including performative and participatory-based works, photography, video, installation, text/audio works, and offset lithography. Her work has been exhibited/presented at LACMA and MoCA, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; ICA/ Philadelphia; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and has received numerous fellowships and awards.
SPORTS is the multidisciplinary architecture and design collaborative of Molly Hunker and Greg Corso based in Syracuse NY. Much of their work has been public interventions that leverage the possibility for high-economy design gestures to have significant urban and community impacts. SPORTS is the recipient of numerous awards for their design work including a 2020 Great Places Award from the Environmental Design Research Association, the 2017 Arch League Prize from the Architectural League of NY, and the 2018 Young Architect Award from The Architect’s Newspaper. Both Molly and Greg are Assistant Professors at Syracuse University School of Architecture.
Ramon Tejada is a New Yorkino/ Dominican/ BIPOC American designer and educator based in Providence, RI. He works in a hybrid design/teaching practice focusing on collaborative design models. His design interests lie in the disruption and puncturing of the Design Canon, inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and the expansion of design narratives and languages. Ramon is an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence.
Founded by Mustafa Faruki in 2010, theLab-lab for architecture is a design practice that has completed work for a number of for-profit institutional clients, including: desire, memory, irony, alienation, humor, vulgarity and loss.
Sally Thurer is an independent art director, graphic designer, illustrator and animator in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from The Yale School of Art and is the former co-founder and creative director of Missbehave Magazine.
Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions have appeared at 1/9unosunove in Rome, Loock Galerie Berlin, Tops Gallery in Memphis, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Four Boxes Gallery in Denmark, and Scaramouche in New York. Solo performances and commissions have appeared at The Columbus Museum in Georgia, Storm King Art Center, Este Arte in Uruguay, The Power Plant in Toronto, The National Academy Museum in New York, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Socrates Sculpture Park. His work has been featured in many group exhibitions, including Queer Abstraction at The Des Moines Art Center, 2019.
Matthew Villarreal is an artist, writer, educator, community advocate, and Chihuahuan desert dweller from El Paso, Texas. His work uses tactile materials associated with both the body and the earth as a way to explore the various liminal points in language, politics, and the psychology of voicelessness. He is an AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship recipient and is currently an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice at the New School’s Parsons School of Design.
Kelly Walters is an artist, designer, researcher, and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and the shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. Walters is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design Program in Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York.
Jeff Williams lives and works in Austin, TX and Brooklyn, NY.
Orysia Zabeida is an independent multidisciplinary designer currently based in New Haven, CT. Her practice explores rituals, patterns, and ways technology interacts with humans and nature. In addition, she's interested in public space and collective and participatory art. Previously she was an art director at the PHI Center and designer at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal with past clients like Bull Music Academy, MIT Media Lab, Italian chef Massimo Bottura and Björk. In 2019, she received the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art Grant to research the relationship between organically formed artistic collectivity and institutional art world structures in collaboration with fellows from Goldsmiths University and the support of the ICA: Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She holds an MFA from Yale University and works as a design consultant for the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA.
Brenda (Bz) Zhang is an architectural designer and a visual artist based on Tongva land (Los Angeles, USA). They are interested in sincerity as armor, physical and cultural construction as entangled processes, and the ongoing practice of translation as a deep inquiry into how power and narrative shape one another. As a queer femme Chinese-diasporic practitioner, they construct new narratives through intentional misreading, misalignment, hiding in plain sight, and an extreme attachment to certain objects. They are a co-founder of SPACE INDUSTRIES and hold a MArch from UC Berkeley and a BA with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University.