S Surface is a Seattle-based urbanist, designer, educator, and curator. Their practice centers the creation and preservation of livable, equitable places, and demonstrates how design can support civic participation.

Surface is currently King Street Station Program Lead with the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Surface was previously co-curator of The Alice, an artist-run exhibition space and writers’ residency, and Out Of Sight 2017, a regional survey of Pacific Northwest artists. As Program Director at Design in Public, Surface organized the annual city-wide Seattle Design Festival and curated at the Center for Architecture & Design. Previously, Surface was an architect at super-interesting! and community organizer with the Artist Studio Affordability Project.

Up to no good design: A Presentation of past & current curatorial/praxis work and contextualization thereof.

Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long term community-based projects, and public art. 

Recent solo exhibitions of Nina’s work have been organized by SITE Santa Fe and Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as university museums across the US. A retrospective of her drawings, titled What Endures, is traveling nationally for the next five years. Her work has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, and on PBS; her writing has been published in American Scientist and Edge Effects Journal. Nina’s research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation award for Arts & Activism, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Nina is an affiliate artist of the National Performance Network. She has recently held positions as an Art + Environment Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art, a Polar Lab Research Fellow at the Anchorage Museum, a City State Research Resident at IUPUI, and a Researcher in Residence in the Art and Ecology Program at the University of New Mexico. Nina lectures as a visiting artist/scholar at universities, develops publicly engaged programs, and consults with organizations that seek to grow through interdisciplinary programming. She is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Pamela Conrad is a landscape architect transforming challenged urban areas into socially valued and ecologically performing public open spaces. Pamela is a CMG leader, with experience on two of the largest environmentally innovative projects in the Bay Area responding to Climate Change — Treasure Island and the San Francisco Waterfront Resilience Program. She brings a strong ecological background to her projects and work on resiliency and climate change solutions. That drive is rooted in her passion for the environment developed as a child growing up on a farm, degrees in Plant Science and regenerative landscape architecture, and experience restoring waterways at the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is a recipient of the 2018 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for development of the Pathfinder landscape carbon calculator and the Climate Positive Design Challenge  – products of an extensive research initiative which she is sharing around the globe.

Mark Ginsberg FAIA, LEED AP, a partner at Curtis + Ginsberg Architects LLP, has over 35 years of professional experience in planning, urban design, institutional and housing projects. A native New Yorker, his national leadership in sustainable design, resiliency, and mixed-income housing has been recognized through his many public speaking engagements. His firm’s work is community and policy focused and includes developments that comprise over 12,000 units of housing, much of it designated

low-income and affordable. Mark has a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University. He is a past President of the AIA New York Chapter and a former co-chair of the New York New Visions (NYNV) Executive Committee. Currently, Mark serves as Vice Chair of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development and President of Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council. He is also a member of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing (NYSAFAH) Board of Trustees.

Emily Eliza Scott’s research focuses on art and design practices that engage pressing (political) ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. More broadly, she is interested in art and the public sphere, critical approaches to the built environment, visual cultures of nature, social and environmental justice, and the capacity of art to produce non-instrumental forms of sensing and knowing. Prior to joining the UO in 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the VU University Amsterdam and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Inst. for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology (ETH Zurich) after earning her PhD in contemporary (post-1945) art history, with minors in cultural geography and American art, from UCLA. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, American Art, Third Text, The Avery Review, Field, and Cultural Geographies as well as multiple edited volumes and online journals; her first book, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, coedited with Kirsten Swenson, was published by the Univ. of California Press in 2015. At present, she is developing a monograph on contemporary art and geological imaginaries and a coedited volume on contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change. She is also a core participant in two long-term, collaborative, art-research projects: World of Matter (2011-), an international platform on global resource ecologies, and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-), a group that develops guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday habitats in their home megalopolis and beyond. Her scholarly and artistic work—which she sees as together contributing to the emergent, interdisciplinary field of the environmental arts and humanities—have been supported over the years by grants/awards from Creative Capital, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, College Art Association, Graham Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Luce Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Annenberg Foundation, and Switzer Foundation. Before entering academia, Scott spent nearly a decade as a National Park Service ranger in Utah and Alaska.

Brook Muller is Dean of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture. Formerly Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon, his research focuses on how site scale works of architecture can support broader scale ecological processes and the design implications of resilient urban water systems. With Behnisch & Partner Architects of Stuttgart, Germany, he served as co-project leader for the design of the National Institute for Forestry and Nature Research (IBN) in Wageningen, The Netherlands, a European Union pilot project for environmentally friendly building. Professor Muller is author of Ecology and the Architectural Imagination.

Trained in photography and architectural history and theory, Esther Choi’s work adopts many different formats: from photographs and videos to installations, books, performances and critical texts. Bridging disciplines, Choi’s diverse practice has focused on the social architectures of everyday life, often examining the political potential for spaces, rituals and historical narratives to act as tools for cultural critique. Forthcoming exhibitions include an installation at the Glass House and a solo exhibition at Texas State Galleries, both scheduled this year. She is the author of the artist’s book Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019), and co-editor of Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017). Choi holds a PhD from Princeton University (2019), where her research examined intersections between modern architecture, art and the life sciences in the first half of the 20th century. She also holds an MDes from Harvard Graduate School of Design, an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from Ryerson University.

Adriana is a Landscape Design Associate at KDI’s Los Angeles office. She is passionate about applying her design experience to help communities in need, marrying a thorough participatory process with an end product that meets all users’ needs. Adriana provides design support for a range of KDI projects including our Productive Public Spaces and gender-inclusive urban design. Adriana joined KDI from a design-build landscaping firm in the Bay Area, California. Her design research thesis tackled environmental and social justice issues in California’s Central Valley. Adriana holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Catholic University of Honduras, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Southern California.

Marissa Ahern is an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs (Oregon) and the Founder of Native Roots Designs, LLC. Pursuing her lifelong passion for design and working with indigenous communities, she earned her Bachelor’s in Environmental Design in Architecture from the University of Colorado and received magna cum laude honors for her thesis, Tribal Housing on The Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Ahern is currently completing her master’s in Community and Economic Development from Penn State and writing her thesis on building the private sector through tribal entrepreneurism in Warm Springs. 

Ahern has dedicated her career to working with indigenous communities; leading to experience nationally through her time with the Native American Political Leadership Program where she worked in HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Washington D.C., and locally with experience working at her Tribe’s Housing Authority and with BBT Architects as they designed the Warm Springs K-8 Academy. Her current work as the Project Manager of the Small Business Incubator Project with the Warm Springs Community Action Team, includes overseeing the design and strategic plan for moving and restoring the historic commissary, the oldest building on the reservation, to create a small business incubator to serve tribal entrepreneurs. The project includes studying the Warm Springs local economy and entrepreneurial ecosystem, giving recommendations for building the private sector and creating a thriving local economy on the reservation. 

Through Native Roots Designs, Marissa takes a culturally responsive approach to design and community economic development, working with indigenous communities in creating and implementing a long-term vision for the success of their Nation. 

Kimberly Deriana is a Mandan and Hidatsa architectural designer and artist who specializes in sustainable, environmental, Indigenous architecture, housing, and planning. She is a 3rd generation Urban Native raised in Bozeman, MT. She received a Masters of Architecture degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her design methodologies focus on incorporating Indigenous lifestyle practices in relationship to past, present and future: designing for seven generations. Deriana strives to achieve exceptional design by weaving together respect for individuality, honor for cultural identity, and appreciation for contemporary quality, manifested in the shape and structure of sustainable buildings and communities.

Deriana is part of yəhaw̓, a collective of Indigenous creatives providing interdisciplinary cultural, art, and design services. Some of her current and past projects include: Indigenous Seattle with City of Seattle Office of Planning & Community Development, Brings the Medicine Sundial with ARTS at King Street Station, and participating on the design team for Chief Seattle Club’s new ?al ?al building and El Centro de la Raza – Plaza Roberto Maestas mixed-use housing projects.

Growing Gardens 

“Growing Garden’s vision is for everyone to have equal access to healthy food and to be stewardesses of our own communities through sharing of resources, educating each other, and learning new skills.  Growing Gardens uses the experience of growing food in schools, backyards and correctional facilities to cultivate healthy, equitable communities.”

Jason Skipton, Executive Director

“With a diverse background in agriculture and community garden education programs particularly in Central America and experience in the Peace Corp, Jason leads the team at Growing Gardens by providing leadership, resources, training and oversight for all staff.”

Liam Maher is a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture. His specialty is in queer contemporary art of the Americas.  

“Dragging Our Way Into the Post-Queer” explores the history of queer landscapes and their inhabitants, beginning with historical practices of cruising and “queer world-making” and concluding with an investigation of how queer and non-queer worlds are integrating in the present day. Using case studies from the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale’s Cruising Pavilion, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, and contemporary drag performances by Manila Luzon, Alyssa Edwards, Pattie Gonia, and Carla Rossi, this talk questions what the future holds for queer communities and their landscapes as they assimilate into mainstream society.