Amanda Williams is an artist and architect who re-imagines public space to expose the complex ways that value, both cultural and economic, intersects with race in the built environment. Williams’ creatively uses color to visualize the ways urban zoning, land use, and disinvestment impact the lives of everyday residents, particularly in African American communities. Amanda has been widely recognized for her work including as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a USA Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation awardee and Public Art Dialogue awardee for achievement in the field of public art. Her work is in several permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. Williams received a BArch (1997) from Cornell University.

Amy Kulper is the director of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London where she is a professor of architecture. She is an architect, theorist, and curator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory, and criticism with design. Her current design research explores the politics of space through the lens of presentism. Her work has been published in journals such as Log, ARQ, The Journal of Architecture, Architecture and Culture, and she has co-curated exhibitions at the Carnegie-Mellon Museum and Roca London Gallery.

PROPS SUPPLY is a multi-hyphenate creative team working across architecture, art, and design, helmed by Lucy Siyao Liu (she/they) and Matthew Bohne. Established in 2021, they specialize in storytelling, spatial experiences, and world building for collectives and like-minded individuals. Their work has been published and exhibited internationally in places like the Architectural Review, Dallas Museum of Art, Documenta, Moderna Museet, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and Beijing Design Week.

Together, Amy Kulper and PROPS SUPPLY are collaborators on Accoutrorama, a portmanteau of accouterments and diorama, examining the racial violence at the heart of the Capitol Insurrection, and the role that architecture, and more broadly, the politics of space, played in the events that unfolded that day.

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) is a visual artist with a studio practice in Grand Marais, Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and colonial institutional authority relating to objects based on possession and display. Current research activities include land narratives, decolonization and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson received a was a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant, a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship.

Anupama Kundoo Atelier’s work begins with and remains close to the deep human need for purpose, refuge, and social engagement. It speaks through details that foster intimacy and variety, sensory and spatial. It is where makers engage with hand and mind to produce objects they are proud of, where they transform simple materials with care and intelligence into purposeful structures, where they are challenged to do more with less, and where they routinely exceed all expectations including their own.

Kundoo’s work is about the innovation and socio-economic abundance that results from research and investment in materials and building techniques. The act of building produces knowledge just as much as the resulting knowledge produces buildings. Each lesson learned and each incremental improvement drives micro-decisions that, over time, produce the disproportionate and cumulative increases that we call abundance.

The future is unknowable, human needs change, and the facts on the ground rarely cooperate with intentions on paper. For these reasons, I prefer fluidity and imprecision over prescriptive purity. Makers and users are invited to adapt creatively in service of themselves and their communities.

Delhi-based Asim Waqif cultivates an arts practice at the intersection of architecture, art, and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying, intervening in, using public spaces. Some of his projects have developed within abandoned and derelict buildings in Delhi that act as hidden activity spaces for the marginalized. Concerns of ecology and anthropology often weave through Waqif’s work and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste, and architecture. His artworks often employ manual processes that are deliberately pain-staking and laborious though the products themselves are temporary. Waqif studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and is now a visiting faculty there. After initially working as an art director for film and television, he transitioned to creating independent videos and documentaries before moving to a dedicated art practice in 2010. His recent projects have been featured at the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2022); Durga Puja Pandal in Kolkata (2019); Offsite, Vancouver Art Gallery (2017); the 8th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2015); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); and a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA (2011).

Baerbel Mueller is an architect and researcher based in Austria and Ghana, whose spatial practice is strongly informed by contextual approaches, with an interest in translating these into new typologies and contemporary responses. She is founder of nav_s baerbel mueller [navigations in the field of architecture and urban research within diverse cultural contexts], focusing on projects located on the African continent since 2000. She is also the dean of and associate professor at the Institute of Architecture (I oA) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and founder and head of [Applied] Foreign Affairs.

[A]FA is a transdisciplinary lab that investigates spatial, infrastructural, environmental, and cultural phenomena in rural and urban Sub-Saharan Africa. Each lab project centers on a distinct question or (com)mission and culminates in field trips and residencies through which applied research, mappings, rural and urban growth patterns, urban prototypes, imaginary (art) spaces, and relational physical interventions are produced. Participants are introduced to the spatial diversity and cultural vibrancy of the contemporary condition of the respective project context, followed by “intensives” that focus on the status and potential of a specific region and interest. This process of relating and making is conceptualized in a reactive and slowed-down manner. Conditions of uncertainty and fragility are embraced. The outcome of each lab is shared and presented in different formats and contexts.

Active internationally, the roots of Barkow Leibinger go back to building for industry, specifically for companies whose technologies drove an interest in evolving technologies and craft. The firm’s approach interfaces practice, research, and teaching, with a focus on experimentation in materiality and how it is transformed by digital and analogue tools and technologies. This research informs the design and construction of building elements for ongoing projects — for example, in the realm of prefabrication, the composition of concrete (gradient or lightweight), timber, and ceramic elements. The spectrum of Barkow Leibinger’s work encompasses various scales. They range from master planning, urban high-rises, offices, and industrial buildings to residential homes, installations, and prototypical exhibition pavilions. In 2007, Barkow Leibinger’s work was awarded the Marcus Prize for Architecture. They have received the DAM Prize for Architecture in Germany in 2009 and several Honor Awards for Architecture from the American Institute of Architects. Barkow Leibinger was established in Berlin in 1993 by Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger following their master’s degrees at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. The firm’s team for CAB5 is supported by Stefan Sauter, Nicolai Junkers, Reidar Mester, Andreas Moling, Federico Lepre, and Ava Hill.

Botanical City calls attention to endangered landscapes and preservation as transformation. We value and protect what you love. Our team works on new intersections between art and science through landscape design strategies that perform long-term creative processes. At Botanical City, we design, plant, educate and learn.Botanical City combines urban landscape designers and artists committed to preserving and transforming cultural landscapes as a long-lasting pedagogical experience to encourage culturally and environmentally healthy neighborhoods. The design approach centers on collectiveness through simultaneous research and design to work beyond oppositions between science, art, culture, and nature.Botanical City research and practice are rooted in three principles: Cities and landscapes are ancestral, alive, and constantly transformed. The work reflects on forms of connectivity across scales and time that focus on modus operandi rather than on strict morphological solutions.

Camille Henrot (born 1978, France) is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over the past twenty years, she had developed a critically acclaimed practice encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. Inspired by literature, second-hand marketplaces, poetry, cartoons, social media, self-help, and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s work captures the complexity of living as both private individuals and global citizens in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world.

In 2013, Henrot received widespread critical acclaim for her film “Grosse Fatigue”, made during a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She elaborated ideas from Grosse Fatigue to conceive her acclaimed 2014 installation “The Pale Fox” at Chisenhale Gallery in London. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition “Days Are Dogs.” She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award and has participated in the Lyon, Berlin, Sydney, and Liverpool Biennials, among others.

Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Lokremise St. Gallen (2023) and Fondazione ICA Milano (2023).

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work deals with the politics of representation and issues of race, gender, and sexuality through histories of colonialism and diaspora. Lin works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2022); The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (2022); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021); and the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2020). Lin’s work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), Prospect.5 Triennial Yesterday We Said Tomorrow (2022), and both the 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennales (2021, 2023). She is an associate professor of art at the University of California Los Angeles.

Carme Pinós set up her own studio in 1991 after winning international recognition for her work with Enric Miralles. She has worked on numerous projects ranging from urban refurbishments and public works to furniture design. Her sharp approach to design, anchored by a constant focus on experimentation and research, has made her work garner worldwide recognition.

Her most significant recent works include the design of the MPavilion 2018 in Melbourne (Australia), the CaixaForum Zaragoza (Spain), the Massana School of Arts (Spain), the Departments Building of the University Vienna (Austria) or the Cube Towers in Guadalajara (Mexico).

Carme Pinós combines her work as an architect with teaching and has been guest professor at the University of Illinois, Berkeley University, Columbia University New York, Harvard University GSD, École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne amongst others.

She received the Arnold W. Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022 and was awarded the Spanish National Prize of Architecture 2021. In 2016 she received the Richard J. Neutra Medal for Professional Excellence by the California State Polytechnic University and also the Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship. She was also named Honorary Fellow of the AIA in 2011 and RIBA International Fellow in 2013 for her outstanding contribution to architecture.

Her widely exhibited work forms part of the MOMA New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018.

Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, HASLA, is the 2023 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient and is in the vanguard of civic space design with a career that spans over 50 years. She is dedicated to design of public spaces, from small community facilities, to campus buildings for premier academic and research institutions, to groundbreaking new transit stations and civic and urban places. Her exploration into the power of how the built environment can improve our daily lives has produced distinctive structures that have become cultural icons.

As an architect, urbanist, mentor, and educator, she has relentlessly advocated that excellent design is a right, not a privilege. For nearly two decades, Carol’s studio has been working along Chicago’s Rivers, including design of the Chicago Riverwalk and a vision for improvements for all 150 miles of riverfront.

Other notable projects include design of the new Oklahoma City Federal Building that replaced the Murrah Federal Building following a domestic terrorist attack; the CTA Cermak and Morgan Street Stations; McDonald’s Chicago and Disney World Flagship Restaurants; the Searle Visitor Center at the Lincoln Park Zoo; the JRC Synagogue in Evanston; UMD Civil Engineering Building; Multi-Modal Terminal at O’Hare International Airport; NASA Aerospace Communications Facility, and Chicago’s new DuSable Park.

Carol’s work has been honored with over 200 major design awards including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, National Design Award, fourteen National American Institute of Architects Honor Awards for Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, over 44 AIA Chicago Awards, and two AIA Committee on the Environment, Top Ten Project Awards for sustainably designed buildings.

Carol is a graduate of the University of Illinois and served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica planning national parks. She has taught an advanced Design Studio at the Illinois Institute of Technology for over thirty years.

Over the past two decades, Chris Bradley has developed a sculptural language around representation, poetics of ordinary subjects, trompe l’oeil techniques, and the exhibition as a site for the imagination. He uses this creative language to encourage his audience to practice suspending disbelief as a method for reconsidering and understanding this shared common world. Bradley has recently presented his work in solo exhibitions at Ackerman Clarke Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Shane Campbell Gallery, Roberto Paradise, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Raleigh, and has been included in group shows at The Renaissance Society, Atlanta Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, and the Elmhurst Art Museum. He received his MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2010. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Meier Achievement Award. In addition to his studio practice, he is an instructor of sculpture at both SAIC and the University of Chicago. Bradley’s practice is based in Chicago, IL, USA.

Chris Cornelius (b. 1971, Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) is the founding principal of studio:indigenous and creates architecture and artifacts that dismantle stereotypes surrounding Indigenous design and offer a distinct vision of contemporary Indigenous culture. Their search for a new architectural language through drawing and making absorbs, embeds, and ultimately obscures direct references to Indigenous forms. This distinct and highly personal approach leverages the cultural underpinnings, devices, and thinking of Indigenous culture to manifest original architecture, art, and objects.

Cornelius was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, studio:indigenous works at intensely varied scales. Cornelius is professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico, and his awards include the 2017 inaugural J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize from Exhibit Columbus, a 2018 and 2022 Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award, and an artist residency from the National Museum of the American Indian. He has exhibited widely including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and was the Spring 2021 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University.

The d-Lab is an architecture and design laboratory located at IE University in Segovia, Spain. Its establishment in 2013 was driven by the desire to address critically the highly regulated academic landscape for architecture education in Spain.Operating as a bridge between pedagogy and practice, the d-Lab seeks to strike a balance, avoiding extremes of being either an autonomous academic design studio or a simulation of a professional office. This middle ground allows it to effectively connect theory with real-world applications, the ideal with the real, and students and professors with current pressing issues. An essential aspect of the d-Lab’s mission is its commitment to engaging with specific urban and rural contexts, particularly those with complex sociocultural and economic dynamics that often go unaddressed by conventional administrative and professional approaches. By tackling these challenges, the d-Lab contributes to a more well-rounded and inclusive approach to architecture and design education while challenging the role of universities in their local contexts. The d-Lab is directed by Professor Romina Canna and involves the collaboration of Professors Wesam Al Asali, Marcela Aragüez, and Maxon Higbee and approximately 200 students since its inception in 2013.

Romina Canna is a PhD in Urbanism, Licensed Architect, Assistant Professor and d-Lab Director at the School of Architecture and Design at IE University. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Technical School of Architecture in Valencia (ETSAV). Previously she has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and in the National University of Rosario. Her research focuses on the relationship between infrastructure and urbanism and the (critical) state of the discipline of architecture when operating in these fields.

Maxon Higbee is an artist and a professor of architecture at IE University. He was a full-time fellow in the Painting and Drawing program at the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon completing his Masters of Fine Arts degree he received a John Quincy Adams Fellowship Grant for artistic merit. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in Visual Studies, in the Department of Art at the Complutense University in Madrid.

Marcela Aragüez is a Licensed Architect, Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Design at IE University with a PhD in architectural history and theory. Previously she has held teaching and research positions at ETH and HSLU in Switzerland, and at The Bartlett in London. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Architectural Histories. Her research focuses on the production of adaptable architecture with an emphasis on cross-cultural post-war practices.

David Benjamin is the Founding Principal of The Living, Director of Architecture Research at Autodesk, and Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). His work combines research and practice with a focus on an expanded and actionable framework of environmental sustainability. Recent projects include the Princeton University Embodied Computation Lab (a new open-source building designed to change over time) and Hy-Fi (a branching tower for MoMA PS1 made of a new type of compostable brick). Benjamin has received awards from the American Institute of Architects, the German Ministry for the Environment, and the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. He was recently featured in Rolling Stone Magazine as one of “25 People Shaping the Future,” and his work has been acquired by the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Benjamin directs the GSAPP Footprint Project, which creates analysis and drawings of the invisible yet critical impacts of buildings—from carbon to biodiversity to labor. Benjamin received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.

Deb Sokolow (b.1974 Davis, CA) is an artist and writer whose schematic drawings and books visualize an idiosyncratic architectural future with both criticality and humor. A number of these maquette-like renderings respond through a feminist lens to the history of architecture and to the social engineering involved in designing the built environment. Her work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale (Athens, Greece) and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), The Drawing Center (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford). Sokolow’s drawings have been reproduced for BOMB Magazine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Comics and in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sokolow, based in Chicago, is a recipient of the Artadia award, two Illinois Arts Council Agency visual arts fellowships and is on faculty in the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Depave Chicago and The Montessori School of Englewood are partnered on the first pilot project for this emerging community-based depaving program in Chicago. The project involves depaving 10,000 SF of the school’s primary playground and transforming it into a green, living schoolyard. Depave Chicago is part of a larger international network of organizations focused on depaving parking lots and asphalt playgrounds in disinvested communities where improving ecological well-being is essential for community regeneration and quality of life. TMSOE (an elementary-middle charter school in West Englewood) is undertaking this project to create a safe, healthy, and life-affirming environment for its students and teachers and a space that signals care and future-building within the broader community. The DepaveChicago/TMSOE partnership is an opportunity to dialog with city agencies and organizational leaders about urban adaptation, community engagement, and urgently-needed transformation of the paved urban environment. Depave Chicago is financially supported by the Walder Foundation to host webinars, trainings, equipment purchasing, and design and engineering services for the pilot project. The Depave Chicago program organizational start-up is guided by Depave in Portland, Oregon, the first established depaving organization in the USA. Dozens of volunteers across Chicago have reached out to get involved in the planning and depaving for this pivotal site.

Diana Al-Hadid examines the historical frameworks and perspectives that continue to shape discourse on culture and materials today. With a practice spanning sculpture, wall reliefs, and works on paper, the artist weaves together enigmatic narratives that draw inspiration from both ancient and modern civilizations. Framed by a host of references from antiquity, cosmology, cartography, and architecture, Al-Hadid’s work gives form to ghostly images abstractly rendered. The artist’s process-based explorations innovate from commonplace industrial materials. Their formidable presence sits steady in the lineage of creation and construction that we associate with the notion of empire, complicated by an often-elegiac tone. Diana Al-Hadid received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History from Kent State University, an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and received a fellowship from the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program. Her recent mosaic murals for New York City’s Penn Station were among 100 finalists for CODAawards. Al-Hadid has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in collaboration with Madison Square Park, and the San Jose Museum of Art, amongst others. Her work is included in collections such as the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Diane Simpson, born 1935, is a Chicago-based artist who for the past forty years has created sculptures and preparatory drawings that evolve from a diverse range of sources, including clothing, utilitarian objects, and architecture. The structures of clothing forms have continuously informed her work, serving as a vehicle for exploring their visually formal qualities, while also revealing their connections to the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history. Her wide selection of materials (wood, perforated metals, linoleum, fabrics) reflect her interest in the coexistence of the industrial/architectonic and domestic worlds. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad; most recently in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In 2010, a retrospective was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, and she has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She received a BFA in 1971 and an MFA in 1978 from the Art Institute of Chicago. Simpson is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago; JTT, NY; and Herald St, London.

Gamaliel Rodriguez turns to the immediacy of his own home in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico in a series of large- scale paintings created in the past year. Continuing his interrogation of the Puerto Rican landscape, Rodriguez’s paintings, which foreground the failure of infrastructure, allude to a dystopian future that is the byproduct of extraction, experimentation, military occupation, and a failed project of modernization. Likewise, as this new series of paintings foregrounds, the artist’s work stems from a sustained, committed, and attentive daily engagement with the area which he inhabits. In 2021, Rodríguez had a solo exhibition at MASS MOcA Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art which featured LA TRAVESÍA / LE VOYAGE, a 60-foot long drawing Inspired by his experience of North Adams and its post-industrial landscape during his time in the museum’s studio residency program.Rodríguez was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1977. He received his BA from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2004; an MFA from the Kent Institute of Art and Design in the United Kingdom in 2005; and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. He has participated in numerous residencies and fellowships such as The MacDowell Fellowship in 2012 and The International Studio & Curatorial Program Residency in 2013. He has exhibited his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia; the Museum Fine Arts, Boston; Domus Artium (DA2), Salamanca, Spain; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. He lives and works in Puerto Rico.

Jean-Marie Appriou (born 1986 in Brest, FR) lives and works in Paris.
He received his MFA from École régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, FR.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Villa Medici, Rome; Public Art Fund, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Château de Versailles; C L E A R I N G New York, Los Angeles, and Brussels; MASSIMODECARLO, London and Hong Kong; Eva Presenhuber, Zurich;and Jan Kaps, Cologne.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Château de Versailles; Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; La Loge, Brussels; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; MAK, Vienna; and the Amsterdam Sculpture Biennale.

Jean-Marie Appriou’s work belongs to the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Boros Collection, Berlin; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Dib Museum, Bangkok; and Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels.

Jeff Carter (b. 1967, California, USA) is a multimedia artist who approaches his practice as a process of negotiation, using sculpture, kinetics, sound, and digital media to explore the intersections of place, memory, history, and the built environment. In several recent projects Jeff has used IKEA products as “raw” material to reinterpret and recontextualize lost works of early Modern sculpture and architecture. Jeff has exhibited his work in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Renaissance Society, and the Hyde Park Art Center. His work has been shown internationally at the Hayward Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; the IKEA Museum, Sweden; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. His solo shows include the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; and Galeria Valle Orti, Valencia, Spain. His work was reviewed in Art in America and profiled in the 7th edition of Bauhaus Magazine. Carter earned his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is a professor in The Art School at DePaul University.

Jennifer Reeder is a film Writer and Director based in Chicago. Adri Siriwatt is a film and television Production Designer based in Chicago and LA. They have worked on several award-winning feature length films together. PERPETRATOR premiere at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. Sight and Sounds says of this film: “Assuming the mask of a slasher/superhero film to critique a patriarchal system that feeds on the exploitation of women. Perpetrator will have its North American premiere in June in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival and land on Shudder in September 2023. KNIVES AND SKIN, premiered at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival and was released theatrically by IFC Films. The Hollywood Reporter praised the film as the arrival of a “boldly original voice”.

Kiel Moe, FAIA, FAAR is a builder and a registered architect. He has taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, Northeastern University, Southern California Institute of Architecture, University of Minnesota, Syracuse University, and University of Illinois, Chicago. In recognition of his design and research, he was appointed a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Pratt Institute Material Ethics Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation/Canadian Center for Architecture Project on Environmental Histories of Architecture Fellowship, a Fulbright Distinguished Chairship in Helsinki, Finland; the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture, and three fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Additionally, he received the Boston Design Biennial Award, the Architecture League of New York Prize, the AIA National Young Architect Award, and numerous design awards for individual projects from the AIA, North American Wood Design Awards, and Boston Society of Architects, among others. He has published nine books including Unless: The Construction Ecology of Seagram Building; Empire, State & Building; Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial; Insulating Modernism; and Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy.

Leticia Pardo is an artist and architect whose practice lies in the boundaries between architecture, research, and art. She has focused most of her career within the field of museums and the design of narrative spaces. Understanding space as a storytelling medium, Pardo’s work explores different ways of displaying objects and narratives, transgressing traditional museum practices, and establishing exhibition design as a determining factor in the conception of interpretive spaces. She has designed exhibitions at numerous cultural institutions internationally, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (CDMX), and Museo Amparo (Puebla), among others. Her work has been featured at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial and the FotoMuseo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City and has been awarded by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Mexico. Some of her recent exhibition design projects include: Una Modernidad Hecha a Mano; In a Cloud, In a Wall, In a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico, and My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the School of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a master’s degree in interior design from Pratt Institute. Originally from Mexico City, Pardo lives and works in Chicago.

Limbo Accra is a fresh-thinking, architecture-infused spatial design practice founded in 2018 by Dominique Petit-Frere and Emil Grip in Accra, Ghana. Much of their work emerges from research and interdisciplinary design projects, rooted in the experimentation with the aesthetic and cultural significance of unfinished, decayed concrete structures in West African cities. Their work is motivated by inclusivity, otherness, and future. They frequently work with other creative disciplines to develop innovative and intuitive approaches for exploring interesting design opportunities. Limbo Accra is inspired by the future of African cities and aims to develop an architectural expression for Accra, Ghana, and the wider continent through urban research, installations, and product-oriented design.

Limbo Accra has recently been awarded a research grant from the Henrik F. Obel Foundation and the 2022 Monocle Design Award, Instagram and Brooklyn Museum’s 2022 Black Visionary Design Award, 2022 A-Cold-Wall Black Designers Fund, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Rolex Arts and Protege Initiative as well as the 2022 Hublot Design Award.

Dominique Petit-Frere (b. New York City, 1993) is the co-founder of Limbo Accra, a spatial design practice founded in 2018 in Accra, Ghana. She is a researcher and design strategist working in collaboration with architects, designers, and artists by connecting with places, institutions, and people through long-term, transdisciplinary networks. PIRG LIME [emil grip] (b. Copenhagen, 1992) is a multi-disciplinary spatial maker. His work focuses on framing and contextualizing the otherwise unseen, unwanted, and unimagined.

LOT-EK is a team of architects, thinkers, and makers. They gather around their love of people and objects—all things made, seen, unseen, dismissed. LOT-EK upcycles and works with the ordinary. LOT-EK’s team is a tight group of designers who bring their diverse voices, sensibilities, and heritages to this common project. The team’s founding partners, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, work in New York; grew up in Naples, Italy; teach at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; and have been practicing together since 1993. LOT-EK’s work has been recognized by awards and accolades from the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices to the American Institute of Architects New York chapter Honor Awards, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. LOT-EK’s second monograph, with Thomas de Monchaux is O+O: Objects + Operations.

In contemporary African visual artist Modou Dieng Yacine’s mixed media works, he combines painting and photography to create a dualistic positioning, where both mediums engage and activate one another. This approach provokes what he calls “imaginative lines and multiplicities of layers,” continuously applied to the surface. Dieng Yacine often allows the imagination of the painting itself to dictate the medium used in the work. He frequently incorporates materials such as denim, burlap, cardboard, wood frames, and vinyl records, affirming both his African identity and the contemporary lifestyle he experiences. To build his distinct color palette, Dieng Yacine selects tones and shades from the Sub-Saharan desert dust, which he adjusts and layers with the shifting seasonal coloration of the American North. His geometry and forms are influenced by his love for Bauhaus architecture and design, resulting in a spatial implementation of emotional gestures and intellectual decisions on the surface. This confronts the chaos of urban African architecture with postcolonial discourse, intercultural dialogues, and migrations. Having spent the last 20 years between the United States and his native city of Dakar, Senegal, Dieng Yacine now bases his practice in Chicago, Illinois.

Oren Pinhassi’s installations examine the relationship between the human figure, nature, and the built environment by conjuring evocative and erotic sites that intersect public and private exchange. His sculptures are frequently a combination of the superfluous and the ergonomic, erring towards the utopian. They mimic familiar objects, seeking to render visible the ways that humankind builds the world in its own image.Oren Pinhassi (b.Tel-aviv, 1985) received an MFA from Yale in 2014 and Bachelor of Education in Fine Arts from Beit-Berl College, Hamidrasha School of Art in 2011. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2022); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone, Lissone, Italy, (2019); Castello San Basilio, Basilicata, Italy (2019); Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2019); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, USA, (2018); Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach-Tikva, Israel, (2017); Tina Kim Gallery, New York, USA (2019); Yossi Milo, New York, USA (2019); and David Zwirner, New York, USA (2018).The artist lives and works in New York City with a studio in South Bronx, NY.

Paa Joe was born in 1947 in Akwapim Hills Greater Accra Region, Ghana. He belongs to the Ga-Adangbe community. At the age of sixteen, he started his ten-year apprenticeship from 1960-1970 as a coffin artist in the workshop of his uncle Kane Kwei (1924–1992) in Teshie. In 1977, Paa Joe established his own business in Nungua. In 1989 he participated in a group exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris France. His work has been sought out by United States presidents and art galleries. Paa Joe is considered one of the most important Ghanaian coffin artists of his generation. He has participated in numerous major art exhibitions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He has trained many apprentices in the art of making these fantasy coffins, including his own son and successor, Jacob.

PARA PROJECT is a studio for architecture founded and led by Principal Jon Lott. Each project is a collaborative effort between a wide range of constituents, guided by the specific needs and curiosities of diverse clientele. PARA works on projects of varying scales and mediums, ranging from cultural institutions and residential work to events and international competitions. Based in Amenia, NY and Cambridge, MA, PARA PROJECT’s work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Harvard Design Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Domus, and the Architect’s Newspaper, among others, as well as in books such as American City X by Princeton Architectural Press (2014) and Shopping Now by Taschen (2010).

Jon Lott is co-founder of Collective-LOK and Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Among other accolades, he is recipient of the Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural League of New York, the Design Vanguard award by Architectural Record, and the New Practices New York award by the AIANY. He has taught at Syracuse University, directing the School of Architecture’s New York City Program. He holds the Master of Architecture from Harvard University and is an NCARB-certified architect with licensure in New York, Massachusetts, California, Maine, and Rhode Island.

Marianna González-Cervantes is a designer at PARA, which she joined in 2021. She was originally born and raised in the sister cities of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas. González-Cervantes holds a Master of Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked at PARA PROJECT and WOJR in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Karamuk*Kuo in Zürich, Switzerland.

Over the past 30 years, Paul Ramírez Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the public, aiming to engineer active audience participation and exchange. His work has been featured in galleries, institutions, and urban spaces worldwide. He is chair of the art department at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and is represented by Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo and New York. He is currently working on a large-scale, interactive art project for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., scheduled for fall 2023. Born in Pomona, California in 1965 and raised in Honduras, Paul Ramírez Jonas received his education at Brown University (BA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989).

Perry Kulper was born in Ventura, California in 1953. He is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was a faculty member at SCI-Arc for 17 years and held visiting teaching positions at Penn and ASU during that time. After his graduate studies at Columbia University, he worked in the offices of respected mentors Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern, and Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown before moving to Los Angeles. His primary interests include the roles and generative potential of architectural drawing, the outrageously different spatial opportunities offered by using diverse design methods in design practices, and in broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination. He was the Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2018-19. In 2013 he published Pamphlet Architecture 34, ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows’ with friend and collaborator Nat Chard. They are at work on a new book to be published by UCL Press. More recently, he has been snooping around under the hood of said digital realms. Fantastic beasts have also been on his mind.

Eilís Finnegan is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Design in the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. Eilís’s creative work and research explores hybrid project generation methods, namely through Artificial Intelligence and digital modeling, speculative programming, and collaborations with adjacent and divergent fields to create “sites” for working and scenographic environments.

Practice Landscape approaches design by paying close attention to the living environment. They are designers, researchers, and gardeners who work to reveal how existing processes are historically grounded. They approach the future through careful testing and expanding methods and believe that the most meaningful landscapes emerge from working with plants first. Founded in 2006 by Rosetta S. Elkin, Practice Landscape is a Women Business Enterprise (WBE) that prioritizes planting design, public exhibition, open access publishing, and horticultural research for nearly two decades. Practice Landscape collaborates with clients who share a deep respect for the land and a commitment to ethical land management. Recently completed projects include a landscape adaptation strategy and coastal meadow for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Captiva, FL), the transformation of a former farm into a regenerative landscape (Lake County, and IL), and Jardin de bord de Mer, a series of public gardens located on lots abandoned due to shoreline erosion (Ste-Flavie, Québec). In addition to their design and research work, they administer the Practice Grant through their nonprofit, the Practice Foundation (501c3). The Practice Grant opens access and expands approaches to landscape design by funding individuals and groups committed to alternative practices.

Project Onward exists to give artists with disabilities a visual voice to tell their stories and change the perceptions of the world. Project Onward is a studio and gallery dedicated to the creative growth of adult artists whose lives are impacted by mental illness and developmental disabilities. Our non-profit studio is inclusive and we embrace artists with a wide range of life experiences. Some are self-taught artists who have Autism, while some are formally-trained artists who have bipolar disorder. There are other artists with challenges that are equally complex. However, all of them willingly explore the innermost recesses of their minds to create powerful works of art.

Founded in Brooklyn, NY in July 2008 and now based in Chicago, IL, Red Clay Dance Company is the brainchild of Vershawn Sanders-Ward, the institutions’ Founding Artistic Director & CEO. They are Chicago’s premier Afro-contemporary dance company, voted Best Dance Organization by the Chicago Reader in 2019 and Best Dance Company in 2020 by the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago. The company is a versatile and dynamic ensemble of Dance Artivist that tours and performs locally, nationally and internationally. Over its’ 15-year history, the company has performed in venues like Grant Park, Pritzker Pavilion / Millennium Park, Dance Center of Columbia College, the DuSable Museum Roundhouse, the Museum of Contemporary Art, ODC Theater, Dance Mission Theater, The Painted Bride, Joyce Soho, and the National Theater of Uganda. It’s Founder, Vershawn Sanders-Ward holds an MFA in Dance from New York University and received awards from Dance/USA, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Harvard Business School Club of Chicago, and Harlem Stage NYC. Her site-responsive choreographic project, Rest. Rise. Move. Nourish. Heal, is deeply rooted in her identity as a Black/African Diaspora woman and the responsibility to be a vessel through which my culture is amplified and evolves.

When production design is at its best, says RUTH De JONG, it is like a magic act— executing directors’ visions so authentically and creating such immersive environments that the actors simply disappear into their worlds.

With a background in painting and photography, De Jong first broke onto the film scene with “There Will Be Blood” in 2007, under the mentorship of renowned production designer Jack Fisk. She quickly made broad strokes into art direction, working alongside Fisk on a slew of films for
directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Terrence Malick over the decade to come. In 2016, she made her production design debut with the critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning film “Manchester by the Sea” (Kenneth Lonergan), and has since created some of recent cinema’s most memorable worlds—
from the revival of the eerie town of Twin Peaks for the 2017 reboot of the series (David Lynch and Mark Frost), for which De Jong was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Production Design; to the stunning, scenic Dutton family ranch for Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” in 2018; to the surreal and unsettling underbellies of Jordan Peele’s “Us” and “Nope” (2019 and 2022, respectively; both of which received Art Directors Guild and Black Reel nominations for Outstanding Production Design).

Her most recent film, “Oppenheimer” (2023, Christopher Nolan), opened to tremendous applause, transporting viewers to the Manhattan Project’s top-secret Los Alamos town and giving a front-row seat to the birth of the atomic bomb. Alongside bringing dramatic and fantastical universes for Hollywood to life, De Jong’s talents blur lines over into residential and commercial interiors; in between films, she’s designed spaces and furnishings for select homes, bespoke shops, and restaurants (LA’s Son of Gun and Nashville’s 5th & Taylor among them). De Jong and her master woodworker brother, Peter De Jong, also founded De JONG & Co. in 2014, creating handmade furniture and home goods out of a studio in downtown Los Angeles.

De Jong resides in Livingston, Montana, with her husband, producer Charlie Skinner, their daughter, and an English Shepherd.

Samuel Levi Jones’ work is informed by historical source material and early modes of representation in documentary practice. He explores the framing of power structures and struggles between exclusion and equality by desecrating historical material, then re-imagining new works. Jones investigates issues of manipulation and the rejection of control in a broad sense. He is the recipient of the 2014 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum Harlem, and his work is in prominent private and public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rubell Family Collection (Miami), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the de Young Museum (San Francisco), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Currently, his practice is based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana, trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, and earned his MFA in studio art from Mills College in 2012.

LAA Office is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Columbus, Indiana that explores the territory between landscape, art, and architecture. The studio was co-founded in 2018 by Daniel Luis Martinez and Lulu Loquidis. Martinez is an architectural designer, educator, and writer whose research investigates the transformation of undervalued sites through a synthesis of public art and public space design. He is an assistant professor at Indiana University’s J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, participated in Art Omi’s Architecture Residency in 2022, was an Exhibit Columbus University Design Research Fellow in 2019, and received an AIA Henry Adams Medal in 2012. His writing has been published in Mas Context, San Rocco, Clog, Drawing Matter, and The Nation. Loquidis is a landscape architect who has built a diverse portfolio that includes gardens, streetscapes, urban plazas, waterfront parks, and resiliency infrastructure. She believes that contemporary landscape architecture establishes a crucial hinge between the environment, art, and human culture. Her current work focuses on using public art and landscape design to foster social life and enliven communities.

Sam Van Aken’s artwork bridges traditional and innovative modes of art making, developing artistic genres to create new perspectives on such themes as agriculture, botany, climatology, and communication. Van Aken’s interventions in the natural and public realm are seen as metaphors that serve as the basis for narrative, sites of place making, and in some cases have even become the basis of scientific research. Van Aken studied art and communication theory in undergraduate school and received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and has received numerous honors, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Association of International Curator’s Award for Excellence, and a Creative Capital grant. Recently, his work has been presented as part of Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, the World Economic Forum, the Seeds of Resistance exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, and New Earthworks exhibition at Arizona State University this past spring. Currently, he is currently the associate director of the School of Art and an associate professor at Syracuse University.

Site design group, ltd. (site) is a nationally award-winning landscape architecture and urban design firm based in Chicago, Illinois. As landscape architects, urban designers, planners, arborists, architects, and creative thinkers, they are a staff of 47 diverse and innovative professionals. They are enlivened by their surroundings and strive to produce creative spaces that inspire, restore, and bring communities together.

As designers, creative thinkers, and engaged citizens, site understands the value of exterior environments that create a sense of place. Successful placemaking leads to the long-term care and use of these spaces by the public. This is site’s goal in all they do: to create spaces that are valued and sustained by the communities they reside within in order to maintain long-term relevance and use.

Using functional systems coupled with “out of the box” strategies, they work diligently with their clients to create spaces that excite and engage users, improve the pedestrian experience, strengthen community ties, conserve and enhance the site’s unique natural features, and push the boundaries of innovation and resiliency. The group was established in Chicago in 1990.

SKETCH is an energetic and multidisciplinary design studio operating in the fields of architecture and design. Its name refers to the rough drawing that closes in on the core ideas of a project. This idea, generated after understanding all the factors of an assignment, becomes their guiding concept. Within the design realm, they are recognized by an honest, uncomplicated vision of design theory, treating space as a dynamic, multipurpose, and flexible entity that enhances the landscape’s virtues and the local culture. The project’s performance drives them through the user’s experience. They are true believers that design should be intelligent and fun. The studio’s team is led by Johann Wolfschoon, who founded the practice in Panama City, Panama in 2006. Since then, it has become a collaborative think-tank composed of designers with extensive cultural and educational backgrounds, allowing them to reevaluate craft and often forgotten solutions with great value and reaffirm or rebuke conventions with conviction through a profound understanding of all the related aspects. Their architects, designers, collaborators, and makers are skillful in a wide range of fields, from research to art history to building technologies.

Studio Chahar is a nomadic architectural design practice that believes buildings shape the discourse of the built environment – not merely as physical objects, but as spaces that evolve with the community. Chahar actively engages in work that fosters an equitable, innovative, and socially and culturally responsible impact on the environment by engaging the community at every stage of the design and building process. The word “chahar” means “four” in Farsi. In Iranian architectural terminology, “chahar” refers to the spaces where the four cardinal directions meet, such as “chaharsoo,” the center of the bazaar, where the exchange of knowledge and expertise takes place. Studio Chahar approaches design challenges by embracing the fluidity of interdisciplinary teamwork and cultural exchange, while envisioning the future transformation of maker culture through a focus on regional architectural craft processes. Founded by Yasaman Esmaili, Studio Chahar has collaborated on projects in the United States, Afghanistan, Niger, and Iran.

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture was founded at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (New York City) in 1983. In recent years, the Center has convened conversations among overlapping constituencies, including academics, students, professionals, and the general public. Its current project addresses the topic of Architecture and Land in the Americas, in its historical significance and contemporary relevance. The Center’s director, Lucia Allais (b. London, 1974), is a historian and critic of architecture whose work focuses on the relation between architecture, politics, and technology in the modern period and on the global stage.

AD—WO (Partners: Jen Wood b. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, 1984, & Emanuel Admassu, b. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1983), is an art and architecture practice based in New York City, and by extension, between Melbourne and Addis Ababa. The practice aims to establish an operational terrain between architecture’s content and container: equally committed to designing buildings and reimagining their sociopolitical contexts. Founded in 2015, AD—WO has undertaken projects in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Germany, and the United States. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Architekturmueum der TU Munchen, and Art Omi. AD—WO’s work is part of the permanent collection at the High Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The High Line is both a nonprofit organization and a public park on the West Side of Manhattan. Through our work with communities on and off the High Line, we’re devoted to reimagining the role public spaces have in creating connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.

Built on a historic, elevated rail line, the High Line was always intended to be more than a park. You can walk through gardens, view art, experience a performance, savor delicious food, or connect with friends and neighbors-all while enjoying a unique perspective of New York City.

Nearly 100% of our annual budget comes through donations from people like you, who help us operate, maintain, and program the park.

The High Line is owned by the City of New York and operates under a license agreement with NYC Parks.

Theatre for One is a mobile state-of-the-art performance space for one actor and one audience member. Conceived by Artistic Director Christine Jones and designed by LOT-EK architects, Theater for One commissions new work created specifically for this venue’s one-to-one relationship. Embracing serendipity and spontaneity, Theatre for One is presented in public spaces in which audience members are invited to engage in an intimate theatrical exchange and enter the theatre space not knowing what to expect. Actor and audience member encounter each other as strangers in this suspended space and, through the course of the performance allow the divisions and distinctions that separate us to dissolve. Since its inception, Theater for One, in collaboration with its presenting partners, has commissioned 75 new works, by established as well as emerging writers.

Tschabalala Self (b.1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in the New York Tri-State. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Recent solo and group exhibitions (public and institutional) include: Desert X 2023, Palm Springs (2023); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen(2023); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial New York City, New York (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore(2021); Centro Pecci Prato, Prato (2020/21); ICA, Boston (2020); ArtOmi, Ghent New York (2019); Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMAPS1, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2017); Desire, Moore Building, Miami (2016); A Constellation, Studio Museum Harlem, Harlem (2015).

Ugo Rondinone is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. The breadth and generosity of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. Rondinone’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2003); Whitechapel Gallery ,London (2006) Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014) Palais de Tokyo, 2015, Secession, Vienna 2015, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 2016, MACRO, Rome 2016, Carre D’Art, Nimes 2016, Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati 2017, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Belvedere, Vienna (2021) Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022 ) and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), Petit Palais, Paris (2022), Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (2022), The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, (2023) and Storm King, New York (2023). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include: The Städel Museum, Frankfurt and The Phillips Collection, Washington.

Vyjayanthi V. Rao (b. 1967, Mumbai, based in New York) is an anthropologist, writer and curator, teaching at the Yale School of Architecture. Focusing on memory, heritage and the built environment, her work explores the intersections of violence, uncertainty and speculation as situated processes through scholarly writing and artistic collaborations based on fieldwork in India and the United States. Her research draws on sound, image, mapping and experimental forms of writing.

Kush Badhwar is an artist and filmmaker operating across media, art, cinematic and other social contexts. He is interested in the ecology of sound and image across stretches of time and political change. He believes in the potential of research and collectivity. To this end, he has worked closely with wala, Word Sound Power, Frontyard Projects and Khanabadosh. Selected screening or exhibition of his work includes at the Addis Video Art Festival, the 65th Flaherty Seminar, Five Million Incidents, Images Festival, Video- brasil, Forum Expanded, Berlinale, MUBI and e-flux. He has also undertaken Pad.ma’s Fellowship for Experiments with Video Archives, India Foundation of the Arts’ Archival Fellowship and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen’s Fellowship Program for Art and Theory.

Sagarika Sundaram is an artist creating sculpture, relief works and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing extensively on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural and the interior from the exterior, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. In 2023, Sundaram exhibited at the Al Held Foundation, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, and the British Textile Biennial. In 2024 she will participate in Bronx Calling: The Seventh AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Sundaram’s debut solo exhibition runs from November 3, 2023 – February 4, 2024 at Palo Gallery, NYC. She is Visiting Assistant Professor teaching at Pratt Institute, and Senior Fellow at Silver Art Projects, NYC.

Established in 2013, WOJR is a five-person organization of designers that works holistically across projects and research to practice architecture as a form of cultural production. Our work extends across the globe and engages the realms of art, architecture, and urbanism. Geographically located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, WOJR maintains an integral relationship with the local and larger academic communities in various ways: William is an Associate Professor at MIT, where he has taught for a decade, and numerous WOJR team members are affiliated with Harvard GSD and other area universities as instructors and visiting critics. WOJR has lectured and led design workshops at various academic institutions around the country and world, including recently being included in the Porto Academy in Portugal. In recent years, WOJR has received growing recognition, which has resulted in commissioned projects that span the United States, from New York to California, and extend abroad to works such as a full-scale pavilion for the 17th International Biennale Architettura in Venice, Italy. Working globally, WOJR has become accustomed to the rewards involved in working with skilled and passionate collaborators from different parts of the world to create projects that are unique and responsive to their varied budgetary, cultural, and geographical contexts.