See Professor Speyer's full CV here.

Joan Ockman is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Visiting Professor at Cooper Union and Cornell University School of Architecture. She taught for over two decades at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she also directed the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1994 to 2008 and was responsible for a multifaceted program of lectures, publications, and exhibitions. Among her numerous publications on the history, theory, and criticism of architecture are Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012), The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2000), and the award-winning Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993). Educated at Harvard and at Cooper Union School of Architecture, she began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in the 1970s, where she served as an editor of the journal Oppositions and was responsible for the Oppositions Books series. She is currently completing a collection of essays titled Architecture Among Other Things, for which she received a Graham Foundation grant in 2015, which will appear from Actar next year; and is collaborating on a major new history of modern architecture, to be published by Thames & Hudson in 2020.

View Joan Ockman's CV here.

Young Projects LLC is a design studio founded by Bryan Young in New York City in 2010, whose work includes buildings, interiors, objects, material prototyping and furniture. Geometry, pattern, texture and spatial complexity play a significant role in creating an ambiguous architecture. The studio explores a variety of methods: breaking traditional techniques for fabrication, hand pulling plaster, growing crystals and burning things, to name a few.

Current projects include a 30,000sf ground-up Hospitality Retreat in the Dominican Republic, a five story 50,000sf mixed-use project in Brooklyn with two floors of co-working space and a museum as the anchor tenant, multiple houses, gut renovations and arts-and-crafts projects for children. In 2018, Noah Marciniak became a partner in the office, bringing a unique dedication to researching construction technology and a new consideration of material detailing.

Young Projects’ work has been widely published and has received numerous awards including The Architectural League of New York’s League Prize in 2013, a Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award from Architect Magazine for Glitch House in 2018, an Architizer A+ Award for the 2014 Times Square Heart installation, a “Best of Design” award from The Architect’s Newspaper in 2015 for the Gerken Residence, a “New Practices New York” award from AIA NY in 2016, an AN Award for the MALI Museum proposal in 2017, an Azure Award for "Best New Interior Product" for the pulled plaster panels in 2017. In 2018 and 2019, the firm was included in AN Interior’s annual list of the top 50 interior architects.

Bryan Young received his Master of Architecture with distinction from Harvard University in 2003, where he was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and the Thesis Prize for his spatial diagrams on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. He received his Bachelor of Arts with highest honors from UC Berkeley in 1997. Since 2009 he has taught graduate-level architecture design studios and seminars at several universities including MIT, Columbia, Parsons and Syracuse. Prior to establishing his studio, Young was a senior associate at Allied Works Architecture and previously worked at ARO, SOM and Peter Pfau.

View Bryan Young's full CV here.

Shahrzad Changalvaee is an artist based in Brooklyn.Working across installation,sculpture, photography, performance and video, her practice responds to sculpture making. Her post-migration works are mainly generated through visual found/basic material and respond to the tension between language and physicality, as well as to the space between ‘wording’ and ‘making’. Through structures that are mostly temporal, fragile and fragmented, she constructs narratives that question local/global, information/anecdote, language/communication and alienism/exoticism.

Her exhibitions include In Absentia, In Effigie, The Chimney NYC, Brooklyn, (2019), The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away, Soho20, Brooklyn, (2018), You Cannot The Same River Twice, O Gallery, Tehran, (2016), Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2015), Recalling the Future: Post Revolutionary Iranian Arts, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, UK, 2014.

Born in 1983, Tehran, Iran, Shahrzad remembers thinking about becoming a teacher on her very first day of school. She has taught courses and workshops in American University of Beirut, Yale School of Art, Caldwell University, SUNY and more. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2015, and her BA in Visual Communications from Tehran University in 2006. Shahrzad lives and works in Brooklyn.