Julie Ezelle Patton

An award-winning poet, performance artist and educator, who’s most recent chapbook, Flower Poem (Tender Buttons), was published in 2024. 

Ilana Savdie

A painter, who was raised between Colombia and Miami. She has exhibited all over the world, including a solo exhibition, “Radical Contradictions,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023. 

Franklin Sirmans

An art critic, curator, writer and editor and director of the Perez Art Museum Miami. 

Mark Thomas Gibson

Head of Painting at Tyler, co-curated the exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo, an associate professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York . 

Nick Cave

A multidisciplinary sculptor, dancer, performance artist and professor, has gained recognition for the wearable fabric sculptures from his Soundsuit series. 

Chris Downey

He is one of the few practicing blind architects in the world, who creates spaces that enhance the human experience with a focus on projects serving the blind, low-vision and broader disability communities.  

Ximena Valle Diaz

The founding principal of FIFTEEN Architecture + Design, a Philadelphia-based, design-focused architecture practice driven by the desire to affect positive change. 

DIGSAU Architects

An award-winning firm focused on mission-driven clients such as ReBuild Philadelphia and education, art, exploration and physical wellness non-profits. 

Inga Saffron

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic. 

Susan Jones, FAIA, of atelierjones

She is the recent recipient of one of five Architectural Record 2024 Women in Architecture Design Leadership Awards and is a national leader in the mass timber industry.  

Principal Shawn Evans and Senior Designer Garron Yepa of MASS Design Group 

They focus on community-based design and cultural heritage preservation, especially in indigenous communities. 

Olalekan Jeyifous

An award-winning Nigerian-born visual artist trained in architecture, whose work considers the relationships between architecture, community and the environment. He has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim in Bilbao Spain and the Museum of Modern Art. 

Sharon Johnston

Design critic in Architecture, FAIA, in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is a partner of Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles. Her firm has been the recipient of more than 30 major awards and has worked on projects worldwide. 

Masafumi Yukimoto (BSArch ’98)

An adjunct assistant professor at Temple University’s Kyoto Campus and founder of the Komy Studio in his hometown of Takasaki, Japan, focusing on process, materials and fabrication experimentation. 

Ray Brower (BSArch xx)

A principal of Perkins Eastman working in the firm’s healthcare practice. An expert in strategic facility planning, he has worked on health systems and hospitals around the world. 

Gerald Brown

A multimedia artist based in Philadelphia who uses ceramic objects, found objects, sound and wall signage. She is an active member of the arts and ceramics community and co-founder of the Clay Siblings Project, which provides free ceramic workshops around the country. 

Abbey Muzza (MFA ’xx, Fiber and Material Studies)

She employs weaving and image making to explore narration, identity and abstraction. They are a Fulbright France Harriet-Hale Wooley Awardee and former Leroy Neiman Fellow at the Oxbow School of Art. 

Marcellus Armstrong

A Philadelphia artist, media programmer and educator interested in archives of Blackness, queerness and their relationship to materials. He is the director of programs and content at the Forman Arts Initiative. 

Ronny Quevado

An Ecuadorian-born artist and New York resident, whose practice includes installation, drawings and prints through which he explores themes of identity, revisioning pre- and post-colonial symbols and reviving indigenous abstraction to create connections between the past and present. 

Cynthia Daignault 

A painter, writer, curator and musician who lives in Brooklyn. The New Yorker has called her “a poet of a painter.” 

Sam Van Aken

A sculpture professor at Syracuse University and a contemporary artist  who crosses genres and disciplines to develop new perspectives on agriculture, botany, climatology, memory and technology’s impact. He is known for his Tree of 40 Fruit, a single tree that produces 40 types of stone fruit. 

Hito Steyerl

A German filmmaker, moving image artist and cultural critic with solo exhibitions at Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam, Serpentine Galleries in London and the Venice Biennale, among other institutions. 

Jennie C. Jones

A multidisciplinary artist whose work engages viewers visually, aurally and physically, often featuring architectural felt and acoustic panels, allowing people to explore embodied modes of perception. Other work features microsamples of Black avant-garde sonic movements. 

Cecilia Vicuña

A poet, artist filmmaker and activist whose work addresses ecological destruction, human rights and cultural homogenization. Her multidimensional works begin as poems, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance. 

Dr. Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University) and Dr. Emily Neumeier (Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University)

They spoke on "Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century."  

Dr. Andrea Achi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

She gave a lecture entitled, “Byzantium and Africa (4th—15th centuries CE).”  

Dr. Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine)

He spoke on “The Ethiopian Eunuch: Gender and Racialization in Byzantium.”  

Dr. Michael W. Cothren (Swarthmore College)

He gave the talk, “Surveying Islamic and Gothic Art and Architecture: Reflections of a Textbook Author.”  

Peter Lukehart (MA ’80, Art History)

The associate dean at the National Gallery of Art. His talk, “By Honor of by Merit: Women in the Accademia di San Luca, 1600-1700,” looked at the roles women played in the accademia by addressing contested ideals about participation and membership for academics of either gender. 

Laura Igoe (PhD ’14, Art History)

The Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the Michener Art Museum in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. She specializes in American art and material culture of the long 19th century. 

Laura L. Watts

Professor emerita in art history at Daemen University in Amherst, New York, and has taught for more than 30 years on subjects including modernism, contemporary art, and visual literacy. Her book, Italian Painting in the Age of Unification (Routledge, 2021) won the Visual Arts Award from the American Association of Italian Studies.  

Nisha Bansil

A glass artist working in New York and the Catskills where she creates commissioned and personal works that deconstruct and reassemble organic forms. She works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a conservation mount maker and preparator.  

Earth Aengel

An international artist and curator that uses glass, metal and body wax to create from their own non-binary, gender-fluid trans experience, navigating fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric capitalism.  

Layo Bright

A Nigerian-born sculptor whose works explore themes of migration, inheritance, legacy and identity through hybrid portraits, textiles and mixed media.  

Sebastian Duncan-Portuondo 

He explores ideas of home, exile and belonging. In site-specific and client-based projects, he uses mosaics, stained glass and colored light to create vibrant environments that reinforce public identities. 

Jiyong Lee

A Korean-born artist who uses a special glass technique called “cold working” to create his unusual, segmented sculptures inspired by the growth of cells. He is a professor of art and head of the glass program at Southern Illinois University.  

Mary Kate McDevitt (BFA ’08, Graphic and Interactive Design, Illustration)

A Vermont-based illustrator and lettering artist, who has created hand-lettering and illustrations for Target, Chronicle Books, Smucker’s and Macy’s. She is the author of the Hand-Lettering Ledger, Illustration Workship and Every Day is Epic.  

Andrea Pippens

A visual storyteller who works across various forms of media for clients such as the Malala Fund, Instagram, Apple, Sephora, Five Below, national Geographic and the USPS national Kwanzaa stamp. She is the illustrator of the Young, Gifted and Black book series. 

Steve Perry of Bailey Brand Consulting

He gave a talk entitled, “The Art of the Artificial: Agency Insights on the Use of AI,” sharing his firm’s approach to addressing AI creatively, how it impacts creative work and triggered lawsuits. 

Chuck Styles

A Philadelphia-based visual artist and creative director, has worked in partnerships with Vice President Kamala Harris, HBO, Marvel, the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago White Sox among many others.