Trailblazer
Naomi House is a Senior Lecturer in Interior Architecture and Interior Design, and Leader in Spatial Cultures and Critical Contexts. With a 1st Class BA (Hons) in Interior Design, she has an MSc in Architecture from the Bartlett, UCL. Working in practice for a number of years for clients including the RIBA, Anish Kapoor and the Tate, she has taught at the Bartlett, London Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art where she is currently Tutor in Critical and Historical Studies.
Trailblazer
Harriet Harriss’s teaching, research and writing are largely focussed upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, particularly those that respond to specific community challenges: as captured in her noted publications, Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy into Practice (Routledge, 2014); and Radical Pedagogies: Architecture & the British Tradition (RIBA Publishing, 2015). Her most recent publication, A Gendered Profession (RIBA publishing, 2016) asserts the need for widening participation in architecture, as a means to ensure the profession remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve.
Dr. Harriss has earned degrees from Manchester University, the Royal College of Art, Kingston University, and Oxford Brookes University, where she was awarded her doctorate in architecture in 2015. She is a Chartered Architect with the Royal Institute of British Architects and is currently an elected Council member of the European Association for Architecture Education.
Trailblazer
Susan Morgan has written extensively about art, design, and cultural biography. Her work has been featured in specialist periodicals and mainstream magazines—publications as diverse as the Archives of American Art Journal and the New York Times.With artist Thomas Lawson, Morgan co-edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an alternative art publication produced in New York throughout the 1980s. A former contributing editor at Interview, Mirabella, Elle, Metropolitan Home, and Aperture, she serves as a contributing editor for East of Borneo, the online magazine of contemporary art, and its history, as considered from Los Angeles.
In addition to authoring artist monographs, profiles, and essays, she edited Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (East of Borneo Books, 2012) and, with Kimberli Meyer, Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, co-curated Sympathetic Seeing (2011), the first exhibition about the groundbreaking work of writer and social critic Esther McCoy.
Currently, with support from Some Serious Business, Morgan is at work on a New Mexico-based intergenerational, collaborative project centered on One Hundred Wildflowers of the Pueblo Country with Tewa Indian Names and Uses, an unpublished collaborative project produced in 1935.
Trailblazer
Catherine Jurca is Professor of English at Caltech and active in Southern California historic preservation efforts. She is a founding member of the Laguna Beach Historic Preservation Coalition, which is working to reverse recent changes to that city’s historic preservation program that would eliminate protections for hundreds of historic resources if allowed to go into effect.
Trailblazer
Ken Bernstein has devoted much of his career to preserving and enhancing the unique architecture and cultural heritage of America’s second-largest city, using historic preservation to transform communities. For Los Angeles City Planning, he directs the Office of Historic Resources and Urban Design Studio and has directed the department’s citywide planning and community planning initiatives. He has led the creation of Los Angeles’ comprehensive historic preservation program and the completion of SurveyLA, a ground-breaking citywide survey of L.A.’s historic resources. He previously directed the preservation advocacy work of the Los Angeles Conservancy, the nation’s largest membership-based local preservation organization, and lectures frequently on preservation and urban planning.
Trailblazer
Elizabeth Smith joined the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation as its first Executive Director in 2013. Previously she held curatorial positions at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
While at MOCA, Smith curated the exhibition Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (1989). She has also authored subsequent publications on the Case Study Houses for Taschen. Additionally, she curated and co-organized such MOCA exhibitions as The Architecture of R.M. Schindler, At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, and Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm.
Smith has also curated exhibitions on artists including Uta Barth, Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Margaret Honda, Jenny Holzer, Toba Khedoori, Kerry James Marshall, Donald Moffett, Catherine Opie, and Cindy Sherman. Her most recent published writing is a text in the 2021 Phaidon monograph Catherine Opie. She is a visiting professor in the Bennington College Museum Term program.
Trailblazer
Architectural photographer and trained architect. Works on image series, publications, and exhibitions with architects and artists, curators and institutions. Based in the Alps, Austria.
Trailblazer
Art historian and curator of the Wien Museum’s architecture collection. Research focus and publications: architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architectural drawing and photography, Otto Wagner, modern living culture. Based in Vienna, Austria.
Trailblazer
Matt Tyrnauer is a director and writer, whose films include Valentino: The Last Emperor, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, Where’s My Roy Cohn, and The Reagans.
Trailblazer
Amber Benson is the author of the Echo Park Coven Novels and the Calliope Reaper-Jones Novels. She cocreated, cowrote, and directed the animated supernatural Web series Ghosts of Albion with Christopher Golden, which they followed with a series of novels, including Witchery and Accursed, and the novella Astray. Benson and Golden also coauthored the novella The Seven Whistlers. As an actress, she has appeared in dozens of roles in feature films, TV movies, and television series, including the fan-favorite role of Tara Maclay on three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Benson wrote, produced, and directed the feature films Chance and Lovers, Liars and Lunatics.
