For the inaugural Places Journal Summer Writing + Editing Workshop, each of our academic partners nominated one student to participate as a Summer Fellow in an immersive Zoom-based course taught by Places editors. During the session and afterwards, 2020 Summer Fellows worked closely with the editors to hone their writing skills in the realm of rigorous and accessible public scholarship, and each has produced a brief essay on the theme of “Architecture, Urbanism, Pandemics.”
Endriana Audisho is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Technology Sydney, considering journalistic accounts of conflict in the Middle East in relation to architectural discourse. She has received the Object Gallery Award for Design Excellence and the New South Wales Architects Registration Board’s Byera Hadley Travel Scholarship, and has been nominated for the Australian Institute of Architects Design Medal. In 2019, she was awarded a research residency by Canadian Centre for Architecture. Endriana is a lecturer and interdisciplinary-electives course director in the School of Architecture at UTS.
Deepthi Bathala is a Ph.D. candidate in Architectural History and Theory at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Michigan. Her interests lie in colonial networks and food transfers as these have shaped architecture. She received her M.S. Arch at the University of Washington, Seattle — where her Masters’ Thesis, “Cultural Translations: A Global History of the Chili Pepper in Architecture,” was awarded the Thesis citation for 2020 — and her B.Arch at the College of Engineering Trivandrum of Kerala University in India.
Shiloh Bemis is an undergraduate at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, where he is also pursuing a minor in theatre. His Honors Thesis proposal examines the overlap of Brechtian dramatic theory and memorials.
Nolan Boomer studied English at Oberlin College and architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. They edit the architecture zine Take Shape, and previously served as editorial assistant at Princeton Architectural Press. Next year, as a Fulbright-García Robles Student Researcher in Mexico City, they will study the legacy of furniture designer Clara Porset.
Holly Anderson Bushman holds an M.E.D. from the Yale School of Architecture and a B.S. in math from Bates College. Her research explores art and architecture from Eastern and Central Europe, with a focus on concepts of transnationalism and design-as-diplomacy in East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Romania in the 1970s and ‘80s. Her writing on art and architecture has appeared in several publications and she has assisted with exhibitions at M 2 3 Gallery in New York and held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Nushelle de Silva is a Ph.D. candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT. She holds a SMArchS, also from MIT, and a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University. Her dissertation examines the ways in which international protocols for moving art across borders, established after World War II, shaped the design of traveling museum exhibitions in the latter half of the 20th century. Her doctoral research has been supported by the MIT Department of Architecture, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Design History Society, among others.
Ciana Frenze is pursuing a Master’s degree in Architecture at Pratt Institute. She holds a B.F.A. in graphic design from UMass Dartmouth and has been a writer and editor for TARP, a series of interviews with prominent practitioners published by Pratt’s program in Graduate Architecture and Urban Design. In 2019, as part of the collective Space Saloon, she collaborated with architects, engineers, and fellow architecture students to design and build an experimental performance pavilion in California’s Morongo Valley.
Anna Sellers Friedrich is pursuing a Master of Architecture and Master of Construction Management at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where her work has been featured in the annual publication, Approach. Anna received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia, and has worked for a Denver-based architectural firm specializing in K-12 public school design. She continues to be interested in the design of public buildings and civic structures.
Negar Goljan is a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, studying architectural history and theory. She received her M.Arch with distinction from the University of New Mexico and was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal. Her research concerns the realm of poetics in architecture, in particular the atmospheric drawings of Étienne-Louis Boullée as conduits for architectural-existential meaning.
Michael K. Hayes is an architect and editor. He is a member of the RIAI and has previously practiced architecture in Dublin, London, and Rotterdam. He is the editor of Architecture Ireland, the journal of the RIAI, and a Design Fellow in Urban Design at the School of Architecture, University College Dublin. Michael has served previously as editor at 2ha, a magazine with particular interest in the suburbs, and at Building Material, the only architectural peer-reviewed annual in Ireland.
Jennifer Lam is a recent graduate of the University of Hong Kong, where she studied architecture. She is especially interested in strategies for making architecture accessible beyond the discipline.
Richard Mapes is currently a Masters Candidate at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Prior to his studies at SCI-Arc, Richard focused on merging design possibilities with his Fulbright research on the intersections between culture and urban-renewal policies. His research at SCI-Arc focuses on ways of working, queer themes in architecture and design, and meditating on points of contact between individuals and contemporary cultures.
Kerianne Taylor Matre is a graduate student in the School of Architecture at the University of Miami. She holds a B.A. from Clemson University, where she majored in architecture with a minor in sustainable leadership, and has worked as a junior healthcare designer for E4H Architecture in New York.
Lauren McQuistion is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Her work focuses on art museums as sites for the formation of the “contemporary”; this research engages tensions between the institutions that define cultural temporality and the built spaces that frame these processes. Lauren holds undergraduate and professional degrees in architecture from the UVA and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively.
Nathan Mollway is a Master’s candidate in architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at University of Pennsylvania. His work was exhibited in the 2017 Chicago Biennial; he has also participated in a project to rehabilitate a Chicago homeless shelter that had not received tax-increment financing from the city. Nate’s pursuit of equitable design has guided him to numerous interdisciplinary internships and community engagements through the national non-profit Design for America.
Lindsay Mulcahy is a dual Master’s student in Heritage Conservation and Urban Planning at the University of Southern California. Her background in history and community organizing informs her interest in the ways in which cultural landscapes shape public memory and social movements. At USC, her work explores the relationship between intangible heritage and the politics of land use.
Aimee Okotie-Oyekan is completing concurrent Master’s degrees in Environmental Studies and Community and Regional Planning at the University of Oregon; she obtained a B.S. in Biology from the University of Georgia in 2017. Her master’s thesis approaches issues of racism and other social inequalities as intertwined with environmental injustices. She aims to shape applied work in real communities, contributing holistic and systems-thinking approaches.
Simon Rabyniuk received his Master of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto in 2019; the previous year, he received the Howarth-Wright Travel Fellowship supporting research on the integration of civilian drones into city skies. His thesis received an ARC-King Medal for architectural research. Prior to these studies, he was a principal at the research, art, and design studio Department of Unusual Certainties. He currently teaches courses relating to the technology of urbanism at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, OCAD University, and George Brown College in Toronto.
Anna Renken holds a B.A. in Architecture and Art from Yale University and an M.Arch with a Media + Modernity certificate from the Princeton University School of Architecture, where she was an editor of the journal Pidgin. She has assisted with a variety of exhibition and publication projects at institutions including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art. With attention to methodological and representational questions, she approaches social and environmental issues from a spatial perspective.
Cordelia Kert Sønder holds a B.A. in Sustainable Architecture from Aarhus School of Architecture. She has worked at Studio Tomas Saraceno, and at Aarhus has served as the Chairman of the Student Council as well as coordinator of the Career Lab. For her B.A. thesis, she designed a Climate Lab and Observatory that enables meditative asceticism and a deepened contact with the self.
Théa Spring is a graduate student at the Tulane University School of Architecture. Her research explores infrastructure and public space in peripheral urbanism. She holds a B.A. in history from McGill University and has lived and worked in Canada, Argentina, France, and Armenia.
Antariksh Tandon is an architect with eight years’ experience, currently completing a Master’s degree in Real Estate Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and has worked in architecture offices in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Beijing. He is interested in the design and development of cooperative housing, with disciplinary interests in finance, policy, and urbanism undergirded by post-structuralist anarchist theory.
Alex Tell is a writer, editor, and researcher whose work looks at intersections of media, environmentalism, and spatial politics. She is a recent graduate of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Alex has written for The Avery Review, BOMB, and Pnyx, among others. As part of the collaborative CCCP/2020, she exhibited at the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
Elizabeth Umbanhowar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Built Environment Program and concurrently completing a Certificate in Cinema and Media Studies at University of Washington. She is also a licensed practitioner and a senior lecturer in landscape architecture. She focuses on transportation and public space in her teaching and in her research employs urban landscape histories and cinema technologies to interrogate the experiences of environmental grief and the concept of “urban pilgrimage.”
Alena Vosse is a Masters of Architecture student at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, or AHO. She received her Bachelor of Environmental Design from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba in 2017. Alena has worked as a researcher with the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation and assisted several studios at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Currently she organizes the Architecture Lecture Series and the Tuesday Gallery at AHO.
Audrey Wachs is pursuing a Master of Regional Planning at Cornell University, where she studies climate-change adaptation policy and community response to natural disasters. Before graduate school, she covered all things buildings-and-cities as The Architect’s Newspaper’s associate editor.
