OURANIADESIGN.COM - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Designer
Andrew Madl is a teacher and designer. He holds a Master of Landscape ������ĻAV from Harvard and a Bachelor of Landscape ������ĻAV from the Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on the exploration and registration of computation/advanced digital technologies in the landscape. He has recently published the book Parametric Design for Landscape Architects: Computational Techniques and Workflows.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer / School of Interior
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Fellow at the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies
Avigail Sachs teaches the history and theory of architecture and landscape and studies the design professions in the United States. Her most recent book The Garden in the Machine: Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority examines the transformation of utopian ideals into practice in the first two decades of the TVA's operation. Her first book, Environmental Design: ������ĻAV, Politics and Science in Postwar America, was recognized with an Award of Excellence by the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) in 2019. She is currently working on two projects. The first, a collaborative project with Micah Rutenberg, is titled The Mechanized Landscape and charts the impact of the TVA's statecraft on the Tennessee Valley. This project combines maps and photographs to provide a visual study of the region. A second project examines one of the TVA lakes - the Norris Reservoir - and its development as a "Landscape of Leisure." Sachs earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, a M.S. from MIT and a B.Arch from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She practiced as an architect and taught design studio for five years before training as an historian.
Job Titles:
- Communications Specialist for the
- Multimedia Communications Specialist
Baxter Stults is the multimedia communications specialist for the ������ĻAV. He earned his BFA in graphic design from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and his MFA in studio art printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In his role, Baxter focuses on graphic design, photography, and videography for the college.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Specialist / School of Interior
Job Titles:
- Lecturer / School of Landscape
- Researcher, and Designer from Knoxville
Caley Shoemaker is a lecturer, researcher, and designer from Knoxville, Tennessee. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from King University and a Master of Landscape ������ĻAV from the University of Tennessee. Growing up in the shadow of the mountain ranges of East Tennessee heavily influenced her relationship to the land. The imposing forms, climates, cultures, folklore, and histories of the landscape provoked an unyielding interest in how our ideas of wilderness and nature direct our hand in tending to, communing with, and inhabiting our environments. As a child she frequently visited Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The juxtaposition of these radically different approaches to interacting with the land - one communing with nature in a "pure form" and the other, pleasure-seeking and capitalistic with a nod to the influences of nature in the background - continues to inform her perceptions of the design of space today.
Her interests and personal history translate into a research and teaching agenda that explores the potential of the complex horticultural ecologies of suburbia as climate change progresses and threatens our preconceived notions of living. Our tendencies to view nature as "other" coupled with our desire for pleasure and respite have created problematic practices and environments. She seeks to uncover and subvert commonly held notions about our interactions with plants in the landscape. Situated somewhere between "back to the land", folkloric practices and abstract computational operations sits her approach to interacting, designing, and working with this living material.
Carl Lostritto's teaching, practice, and research explore the intersections between computation and representation. He practices architecture speculatively with experimental techniques and custom tools. His forthcoming book, , explores the conceptual and practical relationships between rendering, drawing, and digital culture. The publication, like his first book, , is designed to instruct as well as provoke.
A significant body of Lostritto's work is produced by writing code to control vintage pen-plotters. This practice began while he was a student at MIT in the Design and Computation group. Over two decades he's reiterated, indexed, and experimented with algorithms and material drawings. This work has been shown in exhibits, performances, publications and lectures including "" at Roca London Gallery, published by UCL Press, "" at the Miller Gallery of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, and an experimental "Happening" on a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles.
Prior to moving to Knoxville, Lostritto taught at RISD for ten years. He was also the RISD ������ĻAV Graduate Program Director from 2017-2022, during which time he led curricular initiatives to reform, distinguish, and grow the M.Arch program. With a group of interdisciplinary faculty, he also co-created RISD's Computation Technology & Culture undergraduate concentration. Prior to RISD, Lostritto taught at MIT, Boston Architectural College, the Catholic University of America, and University of Maryland.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Graphic Design / School of Design
Cary is an educator + a graphic designer + a serious game designer.
In her classroom, she seeks to create an atmosphere that blends professional rigor and studio experimentation with liberal arts values. In her current work, she has been designing on the ground, on line and collaborative learning experiences (games). Her current projects involve designing gaming environments to teach Design, Education and French.
She is currently serving as the OIT Faculty Fellow and is developing projects that will support her interest in Math + Art, technology + learning and Undergraduate Research.
Catty Dan Zhang is an associate professor of architecture, and the founder of Temporary Office- award-winning design practice exploring architecture and digital technology through the production of exhibitions, objects, drawings, animations, installations, and writings. Her work experiments with the multiplicity of techniques and mediums, translating ordinary objects into performative and synergistic systems to visualize and to modulate ephemeral forms. Her projects have received recognitions internationally in competitions and design awards. She was the winner of the Emerging Designer's Exhibition competition hosted by UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and delivered her solo exhibition The Moving Air in 2020. Her recent solo exhibition Bubble Bath / Interior Cities 0.5 was on display at the MetroLab at Florida Atlantic University in 2023. Zhang's design work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the ‘T' Space, London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, A+D Museum, Harvard GSD, among other institutions. Her recent work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as several institutional grants during 2017-2023. Zhang was a finalist of the Harvard GSD's Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021. She was awarded the first prize in the Pamphlet ������ĻAV 37 competition and is the author of the most recent volume in the Pamphlet ������ĻAV series titled Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids, forthcoming fall 2023.
Zhang recently taught at UNC Charlotte as a tenure-track assistant professor during 2017-2023. She earned a BArch from Tsinghua University, a MArch with Honors from Washington University in St. Louis, and a MDes in Technology from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she was the 2017 recipient of the Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability.
Chad is a teacher and designer. He is the founder of Chad Manley Practice in Landscape and Building Arts. Based in Vancouver, BC., his practice traverses a weaving of landscape, architecture, film, and ecological recovery. His built and immaterial work float amongst the complex continuums of culture and nature, and reflect ancient and contemporary imperatives within the Cascadian cultural-bioregion. A Fellow within the School of Landscape ������ĻAV, Chad's teaching in Tennessee reflects a curiosity in the specific ecologies and conflicting stories of the South. His studios and courses encourage contemplation on the understudied and quiet voices of our world, whereby diverse cultural ephemera and ecological phenomena form a basis or ascent towards meaningful conversation. Whether in studio and or private practice, ‘empathic collisions' are encouraged within the design process, yielding open and non-prescriptive pathways which alternate within the concentrations of rigor-and-play, hunch-and-belief, history-and-future.
Job Titles:
- Advancement Coordinator
- Coordinator for the
Chloe Perry is the advancement coordinator for the ������ĻAV. She is an alumna of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her bachelor's degree in art history.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Lecturer, Design Fellow 2019 - 21 / School of Design
Christopher Cote is a Lecturer in School of Design. His practice explores publishing and distribution methods in public spaces to connect people. He designs and distributes work through both traditional and experimental publishing methods.
Modes of experimental publishing were investigated in his Spring 2021 special topics course titled as part of his Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Practice
- Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Tennessee
For over a decade, Clay Adkisson has been practicing professionally at the intersection of architecture, masterplanning, and real estate development. Today, you can find him working to transform many of Nashville's changing urban neighborhoods into more inclusive, more affordable, and more accessible places to be enjoyed by all.
Clay began working commercial construction at the age of sixteen and has spent every day since making buildings. Today, Clay's work has expanded in scale to include masterplanning for transformative urban districts, delivering award-winning housing designs, and overseeing real estate development for large scale mixed-income, mixed-use projects. Prior to co-founding community design+development practice, Openworks in 2015, Clay worked for award-winning Nashville-area architecture firm, Dryden Studio.
Outside of his professional practice, Clay serves as an assistant professor of practice at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he co-leads the Summer Urban Design Studio. Prior to that appointment, he served as an adjunct lecturer at UT, and as a teaching assistant at Harvard University.
Job Titles:
- Special Events Coordinator
Daniel Lewandowski earned his bachelor's in music business from Visible Music College in Memphis, TN. Prior to joining the college, Daniel spent nearly a decade in the live events industry, managing prominent events such as the Beale Street Music Festival, World Championship Barbeque Cooking Contest, Saint Louis Art Fair, and many more.
Job Titles:
- Visiting Professor / School of Interior
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor Emerita, Graphic Design / School of Design
Deborah Shmerler received her MFA degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1998. She has been teaching at The University of Tennessee (UT), Knoxville since the fall of 2002 where she is currently an Associate Professor of Graphic Design. Shmerler has been an invited lecturer to several national and international venues to speak about issues such as: cross-disciplinary projects, design and creativity, design and the community, expressive typography, and the collaborative student workshop experience. Her current work with the Smart Communities Initiatives is motivated by a desire to forge healthy and sustainable lifestyle communities. She achieves this by merging 20 years of branding experience with Design Thinking methods. Over the years her design work has received numerous awards and has recognized by the AIGA, The CT Art Directors Club, UCDA, The American Design Awards, Step, Rotovision Books, as well as Print and How. She is an AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Design) Fellow, the recipient of an Ellen McClung Berry professorship and a 2012 UT Chancellors award for Multidisciplinary Research. In 2013, she was honored by UT with a James R. and Nell W. Outstanding Teaching award. Deborah is currently chair of the SOA Graduate Committee.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Lecturer Emerita
Diane Fox is a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she teaches graphic design and photography in the ������ĻAV. ��She received her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University and worked for ten years as a graphic designer before going back to school to get her MFA from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville to teach in a university setting.
Fox's goal in teaching graphic design to the architecture, interior architecture and landscape architecture students is to help them gradually build their understanding of the relationship of type and image in a two-dimensional space. Many of the skills they will need both to get a job and within their profession are linked to their ability to clearly convey their design concepts in presentation boards, portfolios, websites, renderings and additional pieces that require such knowledge. Her graphic design work has been seen in Print and How magazines and she has won numerous local AIGA awards.
Fox's research is as a fine art photographer whose work speaks to the perpetually dissolving connection of humanity to the natural world. Her current photographic body of work, "UnNatural History," consists of images taken in natural history museums in the US and abroad. Solo exhibitions of her photographs have been shown nationally and internationally including at the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; Greyfriars Art Space in Norfolk, England; Sarratt Gallery, Nashville, TN; Dom Muz Gallery, Torun, Poland; and Santa Reparata Gallery, Florence, Italy. Selected pieces have been exhibited in numerous juried shows including the Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Georgia; Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; the Camera Club of New York; and Prix de la Photographie in Paris, France. Images from "UnNatural History" are cited in Giovanni Aloi's book Art and Animals and Taxidermy by Alexis Turner published by Thymes and Hudson.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer / School of Landscape
Farre "Faye" Nixon is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape ������ĻAV within the ������ĻAV at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT and dual Master degrees in ������ĻAV and Landscape ������ĻAV from the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design.
Faye believes that the ambitious, and often daunting, tasks required to address the unprecedented complexities of the Anthropocene present an opportunity to enrich and transform the design practice. As such, Faye is a strong advocate for transdisciplinary and collaborative practice, an ethos she tries to embody through her own work as a planner, architect, landscape designer, and instructor. Her research includes investigating speculative and critical design methodologies, using creative writing techniques such as worldbuilding as a design tool, interrogating the ways emerging technologies and design intersect, and co-designing with humans and their non-human counterparts within the context of uncertain climate futures.
She has previously worked as a landscape designer for the non-profit planning and design firm Kounkuey Design Initiative in Los Angeles and for the Oslo-based office of Snøhetta.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor / School of Interior
- Dean, MFA
Felicia Francine Dean is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interior ������ĻAV at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research addresses analog and digital craft, upholstered systems, identity and the creative process, material experimentation, and process driven design. She is working on a new body of work which focuses the interplay of structural and soft systems through the translation of fashion design volumetric sewing techniques. Felicia integrates her specializations into the studio courses she teaches by having students apply diverse approaches to material, form and process explorations during design development.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor and Director of the School of Landscape
- Director, Associate Professor / School of Landscape
Gale Fulton is associate professor and director of the School of Landscape ������ĻAV. Prior to joining the faculty at UTK, he taught landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Adelaide in South Australia. In addition to his experiences as an educator, Gale has practiced landscape architecture, urban design, and garden design at multiple firms across the United States. At the multi-disciplinary firm Civitas in Denver, Colorado, he worked on projects ranging widely in scale and scope such as the San Diego Riverpark Masterplan and concept plans for a multi-modal transit facility at Denver's Union Station . In collaboration with Aptum ������ĻAV, Gale has received awards on several competitions including the Gowanus Lowline in Brooklyn and the Network Reset competition in Chicago. His writing has been published broadly in such venues as Landscape ������ĻAV Magazine,��Landscape Journal,��Kerb, and Landscape India.
Gregor Kalas investigates the architecture of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages with a particular focus on the post-classical adaptations of ancient buildings and monuments. In his publications, Kalas explores the reuse of ancient structures by highlighting that architectural reconstruction engages with historical memories and the reconstitution of lapsed time. His monograph, The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity: Transforming Urban Space (University of Texas Press, 2015), traces the political significance of reestablishing links to the venerable past in downtown Rome during Late Antiquity. His co-edited volume,��Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), sheds light on the vitality of the post-classical city. Support for Kalas's research has been awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Kalas has also pursued investigations of late antique urban landscapes by digitally reconstructing the center of Rome in order to reveal the ritual function of buildings and the topographical linkages between significant city spaces. Currently, Kalas's research concerns the early medieval reuse of public buildings in Rome to establish charity centers such as the church of Santa Maria Antiqua.
Job Titles:
- Architect, Designer, Professor
Hansjoerg Goeritz is a German-American practicing architect, designer, professor, and author associated with pure and minimalist architecture that emphasizes essentials of place, space, light and material. He was trained as a mason, as an autodidact, through traveling, and educated at the AA School London. Since 1986 he is founder and principal of Hansjörg Göritz Studio GbR, an association with representations in Germany and the US. For his early works he received one of the most prestigious architecture awards in Germany in 1996, the Baukunst award to the Kunstpreis Berlin from the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Working across scales, among others his Hannover Expo 2000 metro rail station was an exhibit at the 1996 Venice Biennale, and he build the Principality of Liechtenstein's capitol forum, gardens, and assembly, awarded with the 2010 international Brick award. An educator since 1995, and since 2007 a professor and a 2012 Prometheus medalist at the University of Tennessee, he has widely taught, lectured, critiqued and exhibited, including at Mendrisio, Trondheim, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Zurich, New York, Auburn, and Yale. In 2013 he was recognized as an Affiliated Fellow to the American Academy in Rome. The Bauhaus University Weimar invited him as a 2015 international featured presenter on architecture and education. He teaches what he practices, and he practices what he teaches.