Keynote

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Behnaz Farahi | Assistant Professor | Design | California State University, Long Beach

Trained as an architect, Behnaz Farahi is an award winning designer and critical maker based in Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice from USC School of Cinematic Arts. She explores how to foster an empathetic relationship between the human body and the space around it using computational systems. Her work addresses critical issues such as emotion, perception and social interaction. She specializes in computational design, interactive technologies, and digital fabrication technologies.

 

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. She has also been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, Linz and Context Art Miami, and has been featured in several magazines and online websites including WIRED, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Frame Magazine, and many more. Farahi has won several awards including Innovation By Design Fast Company Award, World Technology Award (WTN) and is the recipient of the BASA and Madworkshop Grants, and the Rock Hudson Fellowship

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Paper Presenters

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Lois Weinthal | Professor, Graduate Program Director | School of Interior Design | Toronto Metropolitan University

Lois Weinthal is Professor and Graduate Program Director in the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research and practice investigate the relationship between architecture, interiors, clothing, and objects. Publications include editor of Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory, and co-editor of Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure.

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Nolonda Jones | Assistant Professor | School of Interior Design | Louisiana State University

Nolonda Jones is an assistant professor of interior design at Louisiana State University. She received a B.S. from Florida A&M University and an MFA in interior architecture from Columbia College Chicago.  Interested in the intersection between design, social change, and culture her professional life has been an exploration of the ways in which these topics inform one another. In 2016 she moved to Nairobi, Kenya and completed a fellowship in Social Innovation Management at the Amani Institute. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in cultural preservation at LSU, with a focus on ecologies and material culture of African Diaspora peoples.

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Barbara Jaffee | Associate Professor Emerita |  Art History, School of Art and Design | Northern Illinois University

Barbara Jaffee is Associate Professor Emerita of Art and Design History at Northern Illinois University. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Chicago and is recipient of academic awards from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. Her work on the relationship between fine and applied arts in the early to mid-twentieth century has been published in journals and anthologies including Partisan Canons (Duke University Press), Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Art Journal, Design Issues, and Art Criticism. 

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Andrea Sosa Fontaine | Assistant Professor | Interior Design Program | College of Architecture and Environmental Design | Kent State University

Andrea Sosa Fontaine is a shoemaker and interior design educator. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Interior Design at Kent State University. Andrea teaches her students diverse and non-linear methods of design through interdisciplinary translations of interior space. Her research has focused on modifications to the practices and languages of interior design, protecting future memory through acts of repair.

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Rana Kamal Abudayyeh | Associate Professor | College of Architecture and Design | School of Interior Architecture | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Rana Abudayyeh is an Associate Professor and Robin Klehr Avia Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee's College of Architecture and Design. Her work amplifies design as a mechanism of placemaking and societal transformation, gauging trajectories at the intersection of advanced digital making, representation, and social justice. Abudayyeh is a licensed architect in her native country, Jordan, where she is researching interiority and displacement. Her teaching is recognized through several awards, including the IDEC Teaching Excellence Award, and her research has been published in several book chapters and journals, including the Journal of Interior Design and Interiors Journal.

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Jessica Caldwell | Visiting Assistant Professor | Interior Design | Pratt Institute

As a designer and educator, Jessica Caldwell believes that every place has a story waiting to be told. For over 15 years, Jessica’s work has focused on environmental branding, creative placemaking and interior design, with a body of work that includes luxury design for brands such as Tiffany & Co, Tory Burch and Bloomingdales. In the fall of 2020, she established FOLKE CREATIVE, a Brooklyn-based research and design studio. Through her work, Jessica continues to expand her creative practice’s mission and commitment to bring cultural awareness and diversity to the built environment. Jessica Caldwell holds a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts with a concentration in Art History from Howard University and a Master’s of Art in Interior Design from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, both located in Washington, DC. Additionally she holds a Certificate in 20th Century Design from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, England. In addition to her placemaking and design work, Jessica currently serves as an Adjunct Professor for Interior Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY and as an Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

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Annie Coggan | Associate Professor | Interior Design |  Pratt Institute

Annie Coggan is a designer, educator, and principal at Chairs + Buildings Studio, a multiscale design studio based in Brooklyn.  She is a full time Associate Professor at Pratt Institute School of Design. Coggan’s practice involves textiles, furniture, and drawings to create a haptic research agenda.  She has been awarded The Fields of Future Fellowship at the Bard Graduate Center in the spring of 2023, a Winterthur Museum Creator/Maker Fellowship for 2018-2019 and an Artist in Residence position at Boisbuchet, Domaine Boisbuchet, France. In 2021. She has published with A Public Space Books, The Book of Errors, a book of illustrated essays looking at the complicated preservation of three American historic houses through drawings and ephemera.  She received her B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont and her Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.

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William T. Willoughby | Associate Professor | Interior Design & Architecture | College of Architecture & Environmental Design | Kent State University

William T. Willoughby is an architect, design educator, essayist, and tenured associate professor at Kent State University. He has taught architecture and interior design for 28 years at institutions such as Louisiana Tech University and University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He served for a span of 15 years as a university administrator and coordinator of programs at two universities. He has been a registered architect for over 30 years and has authored over 45 publications on such topics as design methodology, cultural studies, and design education. He has attended over 50 conferences throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

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Ronn Daniel | Associate Professor | Interior Design | College of Architecture & Environmental Design | Kent State University

Ronn M. Daniel, M.Arch, is an historian and design theorist. He teaches interior design in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University. With Lynn Chalmers, Ph.D, he was co-editor of the Journal of Interior Design special issue “Thinking the Body-Inside” (2021).

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Markus Berger | Professor | Interior Architecture | Rhode Island School of Design

Markus Berger is an artist, designer, writer, and Professor of Interior architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a registered architect (SBA) in the Netherlands, and founder and director of The Repair Atelier: an art/design workshop that investigates and activates ideas of reuse. His work, research, writing, and teaching critique the ethics, aesthetics, and values of modern architecture and focus on forms of change and repair in art, architecture, and design. Berger co-founded Int|AR, the Journal on Interventions and Adaptive Reuse (2009- 2019) which addresses such issues as preservation, conservation, alteration and interventions. His latest co-edited books are: Intervention and Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice, (Berger, Wong), Birkhauser, 2021; and Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, (Berger, Irvin), Routledge, 2023.

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Poster Presenters

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Jennifer Akerman | Associate Professor, Architecture Graduate Studies Chair | School of Architecture |  College of Architecture and Design | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Jennifer Akerman is an Associate Professor and the Architecture Graduate Studies Chair at the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture and Design. She teaches courses in critical practice, including socially engaged design, design-build, and living architecture. Her work bridges architectural education and practice, emphasizing collaborative change in both fields.

 

Emily Ward Bivens | Professor, GraduatenDirector | School of Art | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Emily Bivens works in video, sound, animation, installation, and performance. Her current body of work investigates attitudes of complacency in survival and the transformative power of awe in the nearly overlooked. Individual work has been shown at the Inverse Performance Festival at the Momentary, Bentonville, AR; Skulpturens Hus, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; and DEMO project in Springfield, IL.  Her collaborative work with The Bridge Club has been presented at Press Street for Prospect 3+, New Orleans, LA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Texas Biennial, San Antonio, TX; Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, NM; and the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX.   Bivens received her BFA from Colorado State University and her MFA from the University of Colorado in Boulder. She is a Professor of Time-Based Art and Cinema Studies and a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

 

Liz Teston | Associate Professor | School of Interior Architecture | College of Architecture + Design | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Liz Teston is an associate professor of interior architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Publishing and exhibiting widely on public interiority, select venues include Interiority, MONU, Int/AR, and several book chapters. Her edited volume, Public Interiority (with Karin Tehve, Ladi’Sasha Jones, and Amy Campos), will be out in 2024.

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Felicia Francine Dean | Associate Professor | School of Interior Architecture | College of Architecture + Design | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Felicia Francine Dean is a creative scholar and educator in Knoxville, TN. She is an Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture & Design's School of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dean received an MFA in Interior Architecture. Her scholarship connects spatial narratives, identity, and material cultures.

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Sarah Burry | Graduate Research Assistant | History of Art and Design | Pratt Institute

Sarah Burry is a dual-degree MLIS and MA History of Art and Design candidate at Pratt Institute. She is a member of the Pratt Ostia Project, the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage, and the BlueNet research group for the study of Egyptian Blue.

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Hojung Kim | Assistant Professor | School of Interior Architecture | College of Architecture + Design | University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Hojung Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, merges vernacular construction with contemporary design to tackle architectural challenges in marginalized communities. His interdisciplinary research delves into cultural, socio-economic, and environmental aspects, utilizing regional resources to create sustainable solutions.

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Francesca Romana Forlini | Visiting Assistant Professor |  Interior Design History and Theory | New York Institute of Technology

Dr. Francesca Romana is an architect, writer, and educator. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York Tech where she teaches History and Theory of Interior Design and Architecture. She is a Fulbrighter and an alumna of the Royal College of Art, where she completed her Ph.D. She holds an MDes in Critical Conservation from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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Carola Ebert | Professor | Interior Design | History and Theory of Architecture and Design | Berlin International University of Applied Science

Carola Ebert teaches history, theory and design studio across Berlin International’s interior BA and MAs. An interiorist-architect-architectural historian with a cross-disciplinary PhD, her current research focuses on the history-theory-studio nexus in interior education. Organizer of the 2018 Berlin conference on interior design theory, and editor of the subsequent publication (2024/5).

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Jennifer Meakins | Assistant Professor | School of Interiors | University of Kentucky

Jennifer Meakins is Assistant Professor in the School of Interiors at the University of Kentucky. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her work investigates the relationship between interior design, craft, and gender roles through creative practice and education. Specific areas of interest include analog and digital craft methods, material exploration, and the crafting of inclusive and equitable spaces.

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Krissi Riewe-Stevenson | Assistant Professor | School of Fashion | Kent State University

Krissi Riewe Stevenson is an Assistant Professor of Fashion Design at Kent State University. She holds an MFA in Fashion Design from the University of North Texas, where she began her applied research on the use of craft and digital tools to bring innovation into the design process. In her design work, she blends craft methods with digital fabrication, embracing the value of traditional and emerging tools to support creativity.

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Moderators

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Anita Cooney | Dean School of Design | School of Design | Pratt Institute

Anita Cooney, an artist, designer, and educator, is the founding Dean of the School of Design at Pratt Institute. Prior to this, she spent nine years as the chair of Pratt’s Interior Design Department, where her leadership of one of the country’s oldest interior design programs remade it into one of the country’s best. 

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David Foley | Chairperson Interior Design | School of Design | Pratt Institute

David Foley AIA NCARB Chairperson Interior Design Pratt Institute is an advocate of design as an agent of change and a force for social justice. With degrees in architecture and urban design, he sees the design of the built environment as a highly nuanced confluence of multiple forces supporting an interdisciplinary approach to design pedagogy.

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Sarah Lichtman | Chairperson History of Art and Design | School of Liberal Arts ans Sciences | Pratt Institute

Sarah A. Lichtman, PhD, is the chair of the History of Art and Design department at Pratt Institute. Her scholarship and teaching are broadly collaborative and take an interdisciplinary and feminist approach. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume Design, Displacement, and Migration: Spatial and Material Histories (Routledge, 2023). She is the managing editor of the Journal of Design History. 

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Karyn Zieve | Assistant Dean History of Art and Design | School of Liberal Arts ans Sciences | Pratt Institute

Karyn Zieve, PhD is Assistant Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor CCE in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. She earned her MA from University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D from Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her work investigates cross-cultural communications and miscommunications, particularly those of the long nineteenth-century in France and the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa, as well as questions of historiography, museums and collecting.  She is a co-editor of Interior Provocations: History, Theory and Practice of Autonomous Interiors (with Anca Lasc, et. al.) and section editor of Interior Provocations: Appropriate(d) Interiors.

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Organizers

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Anca I. Lasc | Associate Professor | History of Art and Design | School of Liberal Arts and Sciences | Pratt Institute

Trained as an art and design historian of nineteenth-century France, Dr. Lasc’s publications range from articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and volumes to books, including ‘Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media,’ co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2015); ‘Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail,’ co-edited with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty (Routledge, 2018); ‘Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse’ (Routledge, 2016); and her single-authored study ‘Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession’ (Manchester University Press, Studies in Design and Material Culture Series, 2018).

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Erica Morowski | Assistant Professor | History of Art and Design | School of Liberal Arts and Sciences | Pratt Institute

Dr. Morawski is dedicated to exploring the intersection of design, politics, and identity. Her research and writing center on the history of design in the Americas, with a particular focus on the Hispanic Caribbean.  She is presently completing a book that examines design and development policy in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico from roughly 1900-1960.  Other forthcoming projects include: “Defining Non-Alignment and Solidarity in Cuban Architecture,” in South-South: Non-Alignment and Cooperation in the Construction of the Global South, edited by Vladimir Kuliç, Peter Scriver, and Amit Srivastava (forthcoming 2024). an essay about 1970s Cuban building projects in Vietnam; and “Designing Tropical Destinations: Hotels, Development, and Insular Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean,” in Architectures of the Greater Caribbean, edited by John Davis and Bryan Norwood (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2024).

Dr. Morawski is currently lead editor of Interior Design On Edge: History, Theory Praxis (Routledge, forthcoming 2024).

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Deborah Schneiderman | Professor Interior Design | School of Design | Pratt Institute

Deborah Schneiderman’s scholarship and praxis (desc architecture/design/research) explore the emerging fabricated interior environment and its materiality. Schneiderman’s publications include the books Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior, The Prefab Bathroom, Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space, Interiors Beyond Architecture, Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, and Appropriated Interiors. She has exhibited work and lectured internationally.

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Keena Suh | Professor Interior Design | School of Design | Pratt Institute

Keena Suh is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design Department where she teaches design studios, electives, and construction courses at undergraduate and graduate levels while coordinating the department’s construction-related courses. Her pedagogical focus is in fostering transformative learning and teaching opportunities through community-based, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative learning.

 

Karin Tehve | Professor Interior Design | School of Design | Pratt Institute

Karin Tehve is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she coordinates the undergraduate thesis curriculum in Interior Design. Her own research and writing concentrates on taste, media and identity, and their intersection with the public realm. Her forthcoming book, Taste, Media and Interior Design, will be published by Routledge in 2023.

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Karyn Zieve | Assistant Dean History of Art and Design | School of Liberal Arts ans Sciences | Pratt Institute

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Interior Provocations: (un)making 

A symposium at Pratt Institute

Student Union 

March 23, 2024    10am-6pm

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Admission is free | RSVP is required