For Immediate Release Photos from Venice Biennale HERE

DIMENSIONS OF CITIZENSHIP: ARCHITECTURE AND BELONGING FROM THE BODY TO THE COSMOS

TO BE PRESENTED IN THE U.S. AT WRIGHTWOOD 659, DIRECT FROM VENICE 16TH ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE

Seven projects explore how architecture can respond to the complex meanings of citizenship today; on view February 15 ‐ April 27, 2019

(CHICAGO, IL — December 4, 2018) — Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos, the official U.S. entry at the recently‐concluded 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, will be on view for the first time in the at Wrightwood 659, a new art space located at 659 W. Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago, from February 15 through April 27, 2019. Devoted to exploring the notion of citizenship today and the potential role of architecture and design in creating spaces for it, Dimensions of Citizenship comprises seven unique installations, each created by a transdisciplinary team of architects and designers. Commissioned by the School of the (SAIC) and The (UChicago) on behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the U.S. presentation of Dimensions of Citizenship on view at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago is made possible by Alphawood Foundation Chicago. The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of public programs exploring citizenship and belonging, including talks, performances, workshops, and engagement with local partners (to be announced shortly).

Lisa Cavanaugh, Director, Wrightwood 659 notes, “Dimensions of Citizenship eloquently embodies Wrightwood 659’s dual focus: on architecture and on art that engages with the pressing issues of our day. It would be difficult to think of a more urgent and timely issue than what it means to be a citizen. We hope that this exhibition will provoke visitors to think about multiple aspects of citizenship and how architects, designers, and artists might respond to them. We are grateful to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Chicago for enabling us to present this important exhibition.”

Exhibition curators are: Niall Atkinson, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the College at The University of Chicago; Ann Lui, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Mimi Zeiger, independent critic, editor, curator, and educator; and associate curator Iker Gil, lecturer in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC.

To create Dimensions of Citizenship, the curators asked each of the seven transdisciplinary teams to consider what it means to be a citizen today, when conventional notions of citizenship are being simultaneously questioned and expanded. The teams are: Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe; Studio Gang; SCAPE; Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman; Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research; Keller Easterling with MANY; and Design Earth.

Each of the works in Dimensions of Citizenship grapples with the potential meanings and architectural implications of citizenship at a different scale: from a project focused on the Citizen, to an exploration of Civitas, with its implications of shared purpose and responsibility, through Region, Nation, Globe, Network, and, finally, Cosmos. The resulting works use design to address a diversity of issues, including the meaning of “home,” the right to public space, the uses of civic monuments, the dynamics of borderlands, and the conditions of global migration, among others. What is ultimately revealed is the need for architecture and design to respond to and shape spaces of citizenship at all scales, today and in the future. (See below for brief descriptions of the seven installations.)

A suite of film and video works in the “Transit Screening Lounge” will look at the migratory flows, blurry edges, and transgressive acts in‐between the various architectures of belonging. Filmmakers include Frances Bodomo, Mandana Moghaddam, Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, and Liam Young.

SAIC President Elissa Tenny said, “I am so excited to bring this crucial exploration of citizenship to the United States. During its welcomed reception in the international showcase of the Venice Biennale, Dimensions of Citizenship spoke to our global imagination about the ways in which the built environment affects the politics of belonging. While the exhibition’s focus won’t change in Chicago, it will be an important showcase for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Chicago, who realized the exhibition together, to enact this important conversation with our campus communities and neighbors throughout the city.”

“The arts at The University of Chicago embrace a commitment to experimental scholarship with global impact and engagement with distinctive architecture,” said Robert J. Zimmer, president of The University of Chicago. “La Biennale di Venezia provided an opportunity to collaborate with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on an exhibition that presents the American architectural imagination at its best and dramatizes how that imagination connects to the question of citizenship, a question of urgency around the globe.”

Zimmer added, “We are grateful for the collaboration and philanthropic support that have made it possible to bring this exhibition to additional audiences in Chicago.”

Additional information, texts produced by editorial partner e‐flux Architecture, and previous programming is available at: http://dimensionsofcitizenship.org

Dimensions of Citizenship is sponsored in Chicago by the Alphawood Foundation in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute and The University of Chicago.

ABOUT THE 16TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, titled FREESPACE, opened May 26 in Venice, Italy, and was on view through November 25, 2018. With the aim of promoting the ‘desire’ of architecture, Venice Bienniale President Paolo Baratta explained that this edition, curated by Grafton Architects’ Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, focuses on ‘the question of the free space that can be generated when a project is inspired by generosity.’ FREESPACE included 71 international participants; the U.S. Pavilion was funded in part by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), which builds relations between people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, and professional exchange programs, as well as public‐private partnerships.

ABOUT ALPHAWOOD FOUNDATION CHICAGO Alphawood Foundation Chicago is a private a grant‐making foundation committed primarily to advocacy, architecture and preservation, arts and arts education, promotion and protection of the rights of LGBT persons and people living with HIV/AIDS, and other human and civil rights. The Foundation was lead donor to ’s Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, in , and spearheaded the renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. Its affiliate, Alphawood Exhibitions, brings socially engaged artworks to the people of Chicago. Past exhibitions include Ai Weiwei’s Trace (2018); Art AIDS America (2016–17); and Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties (2017).

ABOUT WRIGHTWOOD 659 Wrightwood 659 opened on October 12, 2018, at 659 West Wrightwood Avenue, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Designed by Pritzker Prize‐winning architect Tadao Ando, who transformed a 1920s building with his signature concrete forms and poetic treatment of natural light, the new space is devoted to exhibitions of architecture and socially engaged art. The space was inaugurated with the exhibition Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture, October 12–December 15, 2018.

ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world‐class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on‐campus galleries, and state‐of‐the‐art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate, and post‐baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world—as seen through notable alumni and faculty such as Michelle Grabner, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Hunt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cynthia Rowley, Nick Cave, Jeff Koons, and LeRoy Neiman.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO The University of Chicago (UChicago) is a leading academic and research institution that has driven new ways of thinking since its founding in 1890. As an intellectual destination, the University draws scholars and students from around the world to its home in Hyde Park and campuses around the globe. The University provides a distinctive educational experience, empowering individuals to challenge conventional chinking and pursue research that produces new understanding and breakthroughs with global impact. At the University, UChicago Arts, which includes nearly 100 arts organizations, initiatives, and academic programs, brings together the efforts of students, faculty, artists, and community partners to infuse creativity throughout the intellectual life on campus while solidifying the University's role as a cultural destination and resource on Chicago's South Side.

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS AT WRIGHTWOOD 659 Future exhibitions at Wrightwood 659 will include a presentation opening May 22, 2019 on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, and an exhibition devoted to Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005), organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid, on view at Wrightwood 659 opening October 3, 2019. In spring 2020 Wrightwood 659 will present Allure of Matter, a major exhibition of contemporary experimental art in China, presented in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art at The University of Chicago. The exhibition is being organized by renowned Chinese art historian and consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art, Wu Hung.

Admission for all Wrightwood 659 exhibitions is free of charge and available by online reservation only: https://tickets.wrightwood659.org/events. Information on ticketing for Dimensions of Citizenship will be available closer to the opening date. For more information on Dimensions of Citizenship at Wrightwood 659 please visit https://wrightwood659.org/ Public Information: [email protected]

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NATIONAL Media Contacts: Ennis O’Brien LLC Betsy Ennis, [email protected] Lucy O’Brien, [email protected]

CHICAGO Media Contact: The Silverman Group, Inc. Beth Silverman, [email protected]

Dimensions of Citizenship Installations & Participants The commissioned projects are:

 Citizen: Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) explores issues of race, fugitivity, and public space. Made of steel and hand‐braided cord, the installation illustrates ideas of black spatial practice and points toward a liberatory architecture inclusive of all citizens.

Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez (Chicago, IL) Amanda Williams and Andres L. Hernandez were collaborators on A Way, Away (Listen While I Say), a 2017 design‐build commission of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. They also both serve as members of the exhibition design team for the Obama Presidential Center (Chicago, IL). Amanda Williams, a visual artist who trained as an architect, lives and works on Chicago’s South Side. Her practice often blurs the distinction between art and architecture, and highlights the complexities of the politics of race, place, and value in cities. She is best known for her series, “Color(ed) Theory,” in which she painted exteriors of soon‐to‐be‐demolished houses using a culturally charged color palette to mark the pervasiveness of vacancy and blight in black urban communities. Trained as an architect at Cornell University, she is a 2018 USA Ford Fellow, the recipient of a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation painting and sculpture grant, an Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellow, and a 3Arts awardee. She recently had two exhibitions on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. Williams, who will take a position as Visiting Professor at Cornell University in 2018, frequently lectures on art and design in the public realm. Through his independent studio‐based practice and community‐based work with youth and adults, artist, designer, and educator Andres L. Hernandez reimagines the environments we inhabit and explores the potential of spaces for public dialogue and social action. Hernandez is co‐founder of the Revival Arts Collective, and founder and director of the Urban Vacancy Research Initiative. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Master of Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Education. He is also on the faculty of the Graduate Studies program in Art & Design Education at Vermont College of Fine Arts and was recently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University.

Shani Crowe (Chicago, IL) Shani Crowe is an interdisciplinary artist who uses cultural coiffure, adornment, and beauty ritual as tools for healing and connection among people of African descent. She is most known for creating intricate corn‐rowed hairstyles, then capturing them as large photographic portraits. Shani received her BFA in film production from Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications. Her work and performances have been featured at the Broad in Los Angeles, on Saturday Night Live in collaboration with Solange Knowles, the Museum of Contemporary African and Diasporan Art (MoCADA), in Brooklyn, NY, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, in Grand Rapids, MI, Columbia University, and Soho House Chicago. She is based in Chicago.

 Civitas: Studio Gang Memphis Landing, a cobblestoned landing on the Mississippi River that served as the city’s historic port, provides the basis for Stone Stories. As part of a larger design process, the project transported hundreds of the site’s cobblestones to Venice—and now to Chicago—to explore how the Landing might become a site of civic memory that represents many citizen voices, past and present.

Studio Gang (Chicago, IL) Studio Gang is an international architecture and urban design practice founded by American architect and MacArthur Fellow . The Studio works across scales and typologies—from cultural and public buildings, to urban plans and high‐rise towers—using a design process that foregrounds the relationships between individuals, communities, and environments. The Studio’s interdisciplinary and research‐driven approach has produced some of today’s most award‐winning architecture, such as the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Writers Theatre, home for a professional theater company located in Glencoe, Illinois, just north of Chicago; two public Boathouses on the Chicago River that provide access to its north and south branches; and Civic Commons, a multi‐city project re‐envisioning public spaces across the United States. Current projects include an expansion of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; the new United States Embassy in Brasília, Brazil; and Rescue Company 2, a facility for FDNY rescue workers in Brooklyn, now under construction.

Intertwined with its built work, Studio Gang develops research and related projects such as publications and exhibitions that push design’s ability to create public awareness and lead to change—a practice the Studio calls “actionable idealism.” These include Polis Station, an ongoing project exploring how American police stations can be inclusively reimagined to better serve their communities; Reverse Effect, an advocacy publication produced to spark a greener future for the Chicago River; and the Garden in the Machine, a proposal for the inner‐ring suburb of Cicero, Illinois, developed for the ’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition in 2012.

A recipient of the 2013 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and the 2016 Architizer A+ Firm of the Year, Studio Gang’s work has been honored and exhibited widely, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Art Basel. In 2012 the Studio was the subject of a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, Building: Inside , accompanied by an exhibition catalogue of the same name. Reveal, a 2011 monograph published by Princeton Architectural Press, is the first volume on their work and working process.

 Region: SCAPE Ecological Citizen used the Venetian Lagoon as a globally significant case study of a region under threat and argues for the politics and practice of ecological activism to generate new regional landscapes of the future. The intertidal architectural artifacts on view, such as sediment fence and biodegradable coir logs (biodegradable logs), represent bio‐reclamation tools for citizen‐led responses to climate change.

SCAPE (New York, NY) Founded by landscape architect and educator Kate Orff, SCAPE is an award‐winning landscape architecture and urban design practice based in lower Manhattan. SCAPE explores the cultural and physical complexity of urban landscapes and their unique textures, ecologies, programs, and publics. Projects range from a 1,000‐square‐foot community park in Harlem, to the $60‐million federally funded Living Breakwaters project, a comprehensive climate change resilience strategy for the South Shore of Staten Island. The firm has won national and local American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awards for their built projects, planning, and communications work.

Kate Orff’s activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, and scholars worldwide. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. Orff earned a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and currently serves as Director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She frequently publishes and is the author of Toward an Urban Ecology (Monacelli, 2016), which explores the redefinition of urban ecology as activism; Petrochemical America (Aperture Foundation, 2012, co‐authored with photographer Richard Misrach); and Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (Princeton, 2011, co‐editor). Orff’s numerous accolades include being inducted into the National Academy; receiving the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture; being named a United States Artist Fellow; and receiving the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices prize in 2012.

 Nation: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Challenging the way we think about national boundaries, MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence presents a mural‐sized visualization of the watersheds, indigenous lands, ecological corridors, and migratory patterns that straddle the political border between Mexico and the United States, suggesting an alternative transborder commons that is based not on physical division but rather on shared assets and cooperative opportunities.

Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (San Diego, CA) Led by principals Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman is a research‐based political and architectural practice in San Diego, California that investigates issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure, and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and transgressing the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Cruz and Forman lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the Tijuana‐San Diego border region and beyond. From 2012 to 2013, Cruz and Forman served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they founded the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Cross‐Border Initiative, as well as the UCSD Community Stations, a platform for engaged research and teaching on poverty and social equity in the border region.

The studio’s work has been exhibited widely in leading cultural institutions across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Medellín Museum of Modern Art; M+ Hong Kong and the 2016 Shenzhen Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture, among others. With Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenböck, Cruz and Forman co‐edited Informal Market Worlds Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (nai010, 2015) and have two forthcoming monographs: Top‐Down / Bottom‐Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Hatje Cantz, 2018) and The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (Verso, TBD).

 Globe, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research In Plain Sight reveals anomalies and the consequent perils at the core of a binary world view. Visitors are shown places in the world with many people and no lights, and those with bright lights and no people, and are suspended between day and night and light and darkness—exposed to the political and social realities of being invisible in plain sight.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York, NY) Founded in 1981, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) is a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi‐media performance, digital media, and print. With a focus on cultural and civic projects, DS+R’s work addresses the changing role of institutions and the future of cities. The studio is based in New York and is comprised of over 100 architects, designers, artists, and researchers, led by four partners—Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro, and Benjamin Gilmartin.

DS+R has completed two of the largest architecture and planning initiatives in New York City’s recent history: the adaptive reuse of an obsolete industrial rail infrastructure into the High Line, a one and a half mile‐long public park, and the transformation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ half‐century‐old campus. The studio is currently engaged in two more projects significant to the city: The Shed, designed in collaboration with Rockwell Group, and the renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recent projects include the Centre for Music in London; Zaryadye Park in Moscow; the Museum of Image & Sound on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; The Broad, a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles; and the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University in New York.

DS+R’s independent work includes the Blur Building, a pavilion made of fog on Lake Neuchâtel for the Swiss Expo; EXIT at the Palais de Tokyo in ; Charles James: Beyond Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Arbores Laetae, an animated micro‐park for the Liverpool Biennial; Musings on a Glass Box at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris; Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design at the Jewish Museum in New York, and the upcoming Mile Long Opera, which will take place on the High Line in New York. A major retrospective of DS+R’s work was mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

In 1999, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio received the “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, the first given in the field of architecture, and in 2009 they were included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people. Among the awards received by the studio are the Centennial Medal from the American Academy in Rome, the National Design Award from the Smithsonian Institution, and the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Laura Kurgan (New York, NY) Laura Kurgan teaches architecture and urban design at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research and the Visual Studies curriculum. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her current research focuses on conflict urbanism and critical data visualization.

Robert Pietrusko (Cambridge, MA) Robert Gerard Pietrusko is Assistant Professor in the departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where his teaching and research focuses on cartographic representation, simulation, and the history of spatial classification schemes. His design work has been exhibited at the MoMA in New York, SFMOMA, and the Storefront for Art & Architecture, among other venues. In 2011, Pietrusko was an artist‐in‐residence at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

 Network, Keller Easterling with MANY The MANY platform proposes the facilitation of migration through an exchange of needs. Favoring cosmopolitan mobility over citizenship, it more robustly networks short‐term visas and suggests that cities can bargain with their underexploited spaces to attract a changing influx of talent and resources—matching their needs with the needs of mobile people to generate mutual benefits.

Keller Easterling (New Haven, CT) Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and professor at Yale University. Her book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines the potentials for activism latent in global infrastructure networks. Her ebook essay, Medium Design (Strelka, 2017), rehearses medium thinking as a way to address both spatial and non‐spatial problems. Other books include Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), which considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse; an ebook essay The Action Is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk (Strelka Press, 2012); Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005), which researches familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world; Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (MIT Press, 1999), which applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure; and Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built (Voyager Company, 1992), a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia that she co‐authored with Richard Prelinger.

Easterling has also published web installations, such as Wildcards: A Game of Orgman and The Highline: Plotting NYC. Her research and writing were included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Henry Art Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League of New York. She has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad, contributing to Domus, Artforum, Assemblage, Cabinet, Domus, e‐flux, Grey Room, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, Praxis, and Volume, among others.

 Cosmos, Design Earth Cosmorama presents three “geo‐stories”—Mining the Sky, Planetary Ark, and Pacific Cemetery—that speculate on the legal geography of citizenship and ask how we should reckon with the epic and frontier narratives that have fueled space exploration and projects for off‐planet settlement.

Design Earth (Cambridge, MA) Led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth examines the geographies of technological systems—such as energy, trash, water, and agriculture—to open up new aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism. The design research practice has exhibited its works at the Venice Biennale and other leading architecture and art fairs around the world and has received numerous accolades, including the Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Faculty Design Award, and the Jacques Rougerie Foundation’s First Prize.

Ghosn and Jazairy each hold Doctor of Design degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they founded the journal New Geographies and were the respective editors for NG2: Landscapes of Energy and NG4: Scales of the Earth. They have authored numerous books, including Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015), Two Cosmograms (SA+P/MIT Press, 2016), and the Graham Foundation grant‐supported Geostories (Actar, 2018), as well as recent essays and projects published in Volume, Journal of Architectural Education, San Rocco, Avery Review, Thresholds, Bracket, and Perspecta. Ghosn is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture + Planning, and Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and a visiting research scientist at the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism.

Participants—Transit Screening Lounge

Frances Bodomo (Ridgewood, NY) Frances Bodomo is an award‐winning Ghanaian filmmaker. Her two short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to play at several other major festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, and SXSW Film Festival. Afronauts was also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the group show Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905– 2016. Bodomo is currently developing the feature film version of Afronauts.

Mandana Moghaddam (Gothenburg, Sweden) Mandana Moghaddam is an Iranian‐Swedish contemporary visual artist whose installation work was most notably exhibited in the 51st Venice Biennale. Following the Iranian Revolution, Moghaddam was granted asylum in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she continues to maintain her studio. Her work, which examines themes such as alienation, communication, and gender, attempts to bridge boundaries, inspire intercultural dialogue, and memorialize often contentious aspects of Iranian life.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter (Chicago, IL) Marissa Lee Benedict is a sculptor and writer who currently lectures in visual art. Considering subjects that range from the distillation of algal biodiesel to the extraction of a geologic core sample using a set of gardening tools, her work draws on traditions of American land art to investigate the material conditions of our recently networked world. She earned an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

David Rueter is a visual artist, programmer, and Assistant Professor in Art and Technology at the University of Oregon. Employing video, custom electronics, software, cartography, and performance, Rueter's experiments and interventions confront established technical systems and their philosophical counterparts, opening cracks for radical alternatives and imaginations. Rueter is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program in Art and Technology Studies.

Liam Young (Los Angeles, CA) Liam Young lives and works in Los Angeles and London. He is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. He is co‐founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank that explores the local and global implications of new technologies; and co‐founder of Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. He has taught at the Architectural Association and , and now runs the groundbreaking Master of Arts program in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI‐Arc in Los Angeles.

Curators

Niall Atkinson Niall Atkinson is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (Penn State University Press, 2016), an excavation of the historical meaning of sound and construction of urban space in Renaissance Florence. His research focuses the experience of space and the reception of architecture in early modern Europe, which has led to several collaborative projects involving the digital reconstruction of the social life and spatial context of Florence in the 15th century. His articles have appeared in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Grey Room, and Senses & Society. His investigation of “Wandering in Rome in the Enlightenment,” co‐ written Susanna Caviglia, is forthcoming in Word & Image.

Ann Lui Ann Lui is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a registered architect. She is a co‐ founder of Future Firm, an architectural practice working at the intersections of landscape territory and curatorial experiments, whose work has been exhibited at Storefront for Art & Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and The New Museum’s Ideas City. She recently co‐edited Public Space? Lost and Found (SA+P/MIT Press, 2017), a volume on spatial and aesthetic practices in the civic realm.

Mimi Zeiger Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles‐based critic, editor, curator, and educator. She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, The New Museum, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. She co‐curated Now, There: Scenes from the Post‐Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi‐City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen. She teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Iker Gil, Assistant Curator Iker Gil is an architect and the director of MAS Studio, an architecture and urban design practice based in Chicago. He is Editor‐in‐Chief of the quarterly design journal MAS Context, editor of the book Transforming (Actar, 2008), and curator of several exhibitions, including BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. Iker has received several grants and awards for his work, including the 2010 Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club and grants from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Iker teaches architecture studio courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.