Adjunct Faculty

Nadir Souirgi (b.1975 NYC) received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2024. He shows with David Castillo Gallery in Miami. Nadir has been an educator for more than 20 years and also worked as a bird guide leading tours in New York City and Alaska.

Headshot

Jon Penvose is an architectural technologist and co-founder of OKIE5, where he serves as Special Projects Lead. His work connects virtual production, artificial intelligence, and architectural computation to produce commercial products, interactive systems, and design platforms. Early experiments included AI R&D work at Scissor Films, where he developed custom software and hardware components for virtual production shoots and contributed to major game-industry cinematics such as Tekken 8: The Story So Far featuring Brian Cox and Persona 3: Seal Your Fate featuring Aidan Gallagher. During this time he also served as an AI developer and integrations engineer for Lifeforms.io’s Planet Garden project, where he designed and implemented an AI-driven swarm of agents named GAIA. With OKIE5 he has led the development of OTTO, WebCTRL, OBBO, OKIE5-AI (a Food4Rhino plugin), and a range of experimental and commercial tools.

Jon has also developed AI-integration systems and computational design workflows for organizations such as POA, PARTISANS, Cumulus, and numerous artists and research groups. His work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, SCI-Arc, the Venice Biennale CITYX Virtual Exhibition, and Pacific Standard Time Museum.

He currently teaches computational design and algorithmic methods at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in the MSD-RAS program and at The Cooper Union, where his courses explore emerging integrations between architecture, fabrication, and machine intelligence. He has taught at Kent State University, Houdini School, the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) in Brazil, and UT Austin (Honorarium), and has hosted AI-focused workshops at SCI-Arc, UCLA, WashU, Kent State, and UT Austin.

Jon holds postgraduate degrees from SCI-Arc, where he developed “Pro-Futures,” an AI-driven multimodal story-generation platform that integrated text, image, audio, and video generation into a single real-time system. His work earned the Hsinming Fung + Craig Hodgetts Postgraduate Award and the A+D Museum’s AI & Generative Art Award.

Jon's CV is available here. 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.