David Baker, LEED AP, FAIA
Principal, David Baker Architects

Principal / David founded David Baker Architects in 1982 and is considered an industry leader in urban and affordable housing design. David has guided and overseen the design of more than 13,000 homes, including a pipeline of more than 1,500 modular units. Led by David in collaboration with 6 co-Principals, DBA has received more than 450 architectural design honors, including two national AIA COTE Top Ten awards. David was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 1996 and designated by AIA California as the 2012 Distinguished Practice. In 2009 he received the Hearthstone Builders Humanitarian Award, honoring the 30 most influential people in the housing industry of the past 30 years.

Gregory K. Williams, AIA, NOMA
Principal Architect & Co-Founder, Mass Architecture & Design

Gregory Keith Williams is Architectural Principal at Los Angeles-based MASS Architecture + Design, which he cofounded in 2005. He received his Bachelor’s in Architecture from UC Berkeley and his master’s program in Architecture from UCLA and has over 30 years’ experience in the residential and commercial market in the LA metro area. In 2010 he designed Auburn 7, one of the city’s first small-lot developments. Dwell Magazine later featured Auburn 7 in an article highlighting the way Gregory capitalized on L.A.’s new Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance to maximize the property’s potential. MASS was also selected by Dwell to appear in its curated 2015 Design Guide Issue of architects in the United States. With former design partner Ana Henton, he is a three-time AIA award winner: For Take a Bao in Studio City in 2012 (People’s Choice); Lukshon in Culver City in 2011 (Jury Award); and Intelligencia Coffee in Venice in 2010 (Jury Award). In 2019, MASS’s Farmhouse restaurant project in the Anaheim Packing House District was selected to be a part of the Say It Loud South by Southwest (SXSW) exhibit in Austin, Texas. In addition to being a licensed California architect, Gregory also has a contractor’s license and is able to combine his passion for design with the authority and expertise to oversee construction. In 2020, Gregory cofounded Urban Renewable, a social-impact development firm that aims to build Black homeowner wealth as it builds net-zero-energy homes in gentrification-threatened neighborhoods. In his spare time, he starred in a Jaguar I-pace electric-car commercial.

J. Yolande Daniels
Founder, studioSUMO West and Co-Founding Design Principal, studioSUMO New York

J. Yolande Daniels is the founder of studioSUMO West in Los Angeles and a co-founding design principal of studioSUMO in New York. The work of the studios consists of institutional and cultural projects in education and the arts to housing and collaborative and independent design research. The independent design research directed and authored by Daniels explores the techniques of encoding or erasing race and gender in the construction of objects and environments to reinforce systems of authority and control in order to reveal spaces and narratives of resistance and autonomy. Daniels is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture, as well as the MacDowell Colony and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney American Museum of Art in studio practice and cultural studies. She holds a master of architecture from Columbia University and a bachelor of science in architecture from the City University of New York. Daniels has taught architecture at the University of Southern California, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Washington University in St Louis, Pratt Institute, and City College. She was previously appointed the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, the Silcott Chair at Howard University, and Interim Director of the Master of Architecture program at Parsons School of Constructed Environments. She is an associate professor in architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kim Yao, AIA
Principal, Architecture Research Office

Kim Yao, AIA, is Principal of Architecture Research Office (ARO). She holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from Columbia College: Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. She has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons the New School for Design, and Barnard College (2001-2011). She has lectured throughout the United States and abroad. She is on the Board for AIA New York and the Center for Architecture as the Immediate Past President of AIA New York. ARO is a New York City firm dedicated to an architecture that unites strategy and intelligence with beauty and form. ARO’s diverse body of work—spanning strategic planning, architecture, and urban design— has earned the firm over a hundred design awards including the 2020 AIA National Architecture Firm Award, AIA New York State Firm of the Year Award, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

Nina Cooke John, AIA
Principal, Studio Cooke John

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Nina has always been inspired by the creativity she witnessed in her homeland: the art of people transforming everyday limitations into innovative solutions. She imbues this spirit of innovation into every design project.
Nina is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design, a multidisciplinary design studio that values placemaking as a way to transform relationships between people and the built environment. Working at the scale of the human body; individually or collectively, in the home or on the street, responding to how we use space in our everyday lives, whether in the family unit or as a community. Studio Cooke John was recently selected to design the Flatiron Public Plaza Installation for 2020. The public art installation was on view from November through January 1st 2021. Nina’s work has also been featured in Architectural Record, Madame Architect, on NBC’s Open House New York, in Dwell Magazine’s “13 Extraordinary Women in Design and Architecture You Need to Know” and the Center for Architecture’s 2018 exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture. Nina is one of five finalists selected to design the new Harriet Tubman Monument in Newark. Nina earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University. She now teaches at Parsons School of Design and Columbia University.

William O’Brien Jr.
Principal, WOJR
Associate Professor, MIT
Director of Design, Samara

William O’Brien Jr. is founder and principal of WOJR: Organization for Architecture and a tenured Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture, as well as one of the founding members of Collective–LOK. From 2019, he is also the Director of Design at Samara of Airbnb. He is the recipient of the 2012-2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He was awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. He has taught previously at University of California Berkeley as the Bernard Maybeck Fellow and was the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University. Before joining MIT, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught advanced theory seminars and design studios in the graduate curriculum. At MIT, O’Brien currently holds the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair and teaches design studios in the graduate and undergraduate programs. O’Brien pursued his graduate studies at Harvard GSD where he was the recipient of the Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award. He has been named a Fellow by MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.

Elaine Molinar, AIA

Elaine Molinar is an architect and Managing Partner of Snøhetta’s US offices, a 65-person interdisciplinary design studio which takes an integrative approach to architecture, landscape, and interior architecture, as well as graphics and branding.

Her commitment to the issues of social and physical well-being influence her work not only as a design leader but also as an employer and cultivator of Snøhetta’s growing practice. Her early training in classical dance and performance brings an insightful understanding of ergonomics, perception, and comfort to the environments we design and inhabit. Her experience in the design of theaters, libraries, and the workplace has given Elaine an in depth understanding of complex programmatic issues and has positioned her well to champion design from the user’s point of view.

In 2005, she helped found Snøhetta’s New York office after the firm was awarded the National September 11th Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center in 2004, the office’s first commission in the Americas.

Elaine currently leads general management, strategic planning and business development at Snøhetta. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the American Institute of Architects and is a LEED accredited professional. Elaine also serves on the board of trustees of the Van Alen Institute.

Brett Steele

Brett Steele (AA DIPL, HON FRIBA, FRSA) is the first architect appointed as dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts). He is a frequent visiting lecturer, presenter, and critic at universities, cultural centers, and offices worldwide as well as a leader in arts and architecture education. Brett is a teacher, writer, and leading voice on architecture, cities, and education. He has served on arts and architecture commissions, juries, and policy planning initiatives around the world and has been appointed reviewer and advisor of arts and architecture schools in the U.S. and abroad. His academic experience and scholarly interests focus on the modern and contemporary conditions of arts education and culture, and he has written extensively on the expansive circumstances of today’s electronic, computational design studios.

Prior to his appointment as dean of UCLA Arts, Brett was the director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, where he led a decade-long transformation and expansion of one of the world’s most renowned schools of architecture. The AA’s alumni include Pritzker Prize, RIBA, and AIA Gold medal winners including Lord Richard Rogers, Cedric Price, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid, with whom Brett collaborated closely early in his career.

Brett has convened and hosted programs at art and architectural biennales that have included leading designers, artists, philosophers, curators, and architects. In 2014, on the centennial of the most influential 20th century architectural project, Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino, Brett commissioned a 1:1, building-sized working model of the prototype structure, which was installed at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He launched the AA Visiting School in 2008, which now operates design workshops, courses, and public programs in more than 50 locations worldwide, embedding the arts and architecture in wider communication networks and promoting learning, exchange, and experience.

Brett is the editor and author of Negotiate My Boundary (2002); Corporate Fields (2005); Design as Research (2005); First Works: Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s (2009); Supercritical: Peter Eisenman Meets Rem Koolhaas (2009); 014: Projection & Reception (2012); Net Works: The Rise of Collaborative and Distributed Architecture (forthcoming, 2019); and Machine Works: The Rise of Modern Architectural Automation (forthcoming, 2020). His articles, interviews, and lectures have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Arch+, Architectural Design, Architectural Review, A+U, AA Files, Harvard Design Magazine, World Architecture, Log, Domus, Monocle, Icon, on CNN, the BBC, and other outlets. Brett is the founder and series editor of Architecture Words, which has published critical writings of Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Max Bill, Sylvia Lavin, Detlef Mertins, Kengo Kuma, Toyo Ito, and others.

Brett grew up in Oregon and Idaho, and studied at the University of Oregon, the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and the San Francisco Center for Architecture and Urban Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute before receiving his diploma in architecture from the AA in London.

He is married to architect Natasha Sandmeier with whom he has two children. Brett’s pastimes include long-distance running and fly fishing.

Mario Cipresso, AIA

Mario Cipresso has over 20 years of global design experience in a broad range of project types including higher education, workplace, cultural, housing, supertall towers and masterplanning. He has received numerous awards for his design work which has been exhibited and published extensively.

As Associate Principal at Hawkins/Brown,  licensed architect and LEED accredited professional active in the architecture and planning community, Mario currently serves on the board of the AIA Los Angeles Urban Design Committee. He is an adjunct professor at USC where he teaches architectural design and planning and maintains a close connection to emerging thought and technologies in academia.

Mario has a strong appreciation for nature and can be found exploring and camping in the myriad state and national parks the U.S. has to offer with his wife and two children whenever possible.

Elizabeth Timme

Elizabeth is a third generation architect born in Houston and raised in Los Angeles. Watching her parents build in remote locations and start a design school meant that Elizabeth grew to see the practice of architecture as a community-based profession. Growing up in Texas where land use planning and zoning is limited and California where exclusionary zoning practices are historic, Elizabeth is excited by the challenge of Los Angeles where rules are plentiful but often contradictory.

Elizabeth co-founded LA-Más because she saw a need for a design approach to be integrated early on in public projects and civic planning. She believes designers can help create a unified vision, identify creative alternatives, and work in partnership with communities. Elizabeth provides leadership at LA-Más by ensuring all projects are thoughtfully designed and critically engage systemic problems. Elizabeth has extensive experience in architecture and construction administration having worked at MASS Design Group, Ball-Nogues Studio, and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca. Elizabeth has taught design build studios at Woodbury University’s Agency for Civic Engagement (ACE) Center and serves on the Zoning Advisory Committee of Re: Code LA, a city-led effort to transform the city’s outdated zoning code. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Southern California.

David Benjamin

David Benjamin is Founding Principal of The Living and Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP. He also directs the GSAPP Incubator at the New Museum’s NEW INC. Benjamin’s work combines research and practice, and it involves exploring new ideas through prototyping. Focusing on the intersection of biology, computation, and design, Benjamin has articulated three frameworks for harnessing living organisms for architecture: bio-processing, bio-sensing, and bio-manufacturing.

Anne Schopf, FAIA

Recognized locally, regionally and nationally for excellence in design within the public realm, Anne Schopf FAIA, Design Partner with Mahlum Architects, strives to create healthy and sustainable communities that support equity and inclusion for all. Under her leadership, Mahlum received the 2014 Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects Northwest and Pacific Region (AIA NWPR). She currently serves as an Advisory Group Member of the National AIA Committee on the Environment.

Bill Leddy, FAIA

A founding Principal of LEDDY MAYTUM STACY Architects in San Francisco, William Leddy, FAIA, believes that architecture has an important role to play in leading our communities toward a just, carbon-neutral future for all.

Doug Noble, FAIA

Douglas E. Noble, FAIA, Ph.D., is a tenured faculty member at the USC School of Architecture and a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He is known for his work in four overlapping arenas: Architectural Computing, Building Science, Architecture Education, and Design Theories and Methods. Noble received the ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award in 1995, and the ACSA Creative Achievement Award in 2013. He was named among the “10 most admired educators” in architecture in 2010 and was twice more selected as a “most admired educator” in 2015 and 2018 by DesignIntellegence. Noble is the recipient of the 2017 American Institute of Architects Los Angeles Chapter Presidential Honor as educator of the year.