Speakers

Michael Allen’s work encompasses architectural history, cultural geography, historic preservation, and political activism. His scholarly work seeks to reveal the ways in which the built environment encodes hegemonic and oppositional power relationships (political and aesthetic), economic histories, and granular imposition of statecraft. Additionally, Allen practices critical heritage conservation, documenting buildings and cultural landscapes as possible clues to a collective future and reminders of an unresolved past. Both practices are committed to decoding architecture’s relationship to systemic oppression, colonialism and dispossession.

Allen currently holds appointments as senior lecturer in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design in the Sam Fox School and as lecturer in American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences. At the Sam Fox School, Allen teaches graduate elective seminars that explore the historic contexts, political constitutions, and embodied impacts of design practices. One major current research project interrogates the parallel histories of postwar mass housing projects in the United States and Yugoslavia.

Allen’s critical and scholarly writing has appeared in ArchDaily, Buildings and Landscapes, CityLab, CTheory, Disegno, Next City, Temporary Art Review, Preservation Leadership Forum, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and other outlets. Recently he has contributed chapters to Midwest Architectural Journeys (2019; Zach Mortice, editor) and Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (2016; Max Page and Marla Miller, editors).

Allen also directs the Preservation Research Office, a heritage consultancy that works nationally, and frequently guides critical geographic and architectural tours in and around St. Louis.

Carmon Colangelo (he/him) joined Washington University in July 2006 as the first dean of the Sam Fox School. In this role, he oversees the School’s academic units—the College of Art, Graduate School of Art, College of Architecture, and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design—as well as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, home to one of the nation’s finest university collections of modern art. Colangelo was installed as the Ralph J. Nagel Dean in November 2016. He also serves as a member of the University Council and as the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts.

A widely exhibited artist, Colangelo combines digital and traditional processes to create large, colorful, mixed-media prints that explore various ideas about the human experience and contemporary condition, from violent weather patterns and climate, to the anxieties and instability experienced around the world. His work has been featured in more than 40 solo shows and 150 group exhibitions across the United States and in Argentina, Canada, England, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and South Korea. His work has been collected by many of the nation’s leading museums, including the National Museum of American Art (Washington, DC), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. He is represented by Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, and Flying Horse Editions in Orlando.

From 1984 to 1996, Colangelo headed the Printmaking Department at West Virginia University and was named chair of the Division of Art in 1993. In 1997, he became director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia (Athens). Born in Toronto, Colangelo earned a BFA in Printmaking and Painting from the University of Windsor in Ontario in 1981 and an MFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University in 1983.

Jennifer Colten’s work focuses on ambiguous landscapes, social spaces, and cultural geographies exploring sites at the margins of the urban environment, and spaces that reveal a resilience of ecological transformation. Central concerns within her photographic practice reflect questions surrounding the representation of landscape, and examine multiple issues revealing social, cultural, and environmental implications of land use.

Colten has received a number of selective grants to support the development of ongoing projects. The include a Mid-America Arts Alliance grant, the Ferguson Academic Seed Grant, and two Artist Support Grants from the Regional Arts Commission in St Louis.

In addition to private collections, Colten’s photographs have been included in a number of national and international institutions. The Denver Art Museum; Olin Special Collections at Washington University in St. Louis; The Museum Hundertwasser, Vienna; the Museum für Fotografie, Braunschweig, Germany; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota; Museo de Antioquia and Bellas Artes Institute, both in Medellín, Colombia; and the Centro Colombo Americano Institutions in Medellín and Periera Colombia, South America.

An unapologetic sculptor, Amy Hauft (she/her) grew up in Southern California. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lived most of her adult life in New York City, followed by an eight-year stint in Richmond, Virginia, and then seven years in Austin, Texas. She resettled in St. Louis in 2019.

Hauft creates architectural-scale installations; she builds haptic situations in which the viewer’s experience is equally palpable as physical and cognitive events. She has presented her work in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the New Museum (New York), the International Artists’ Museum (Poland), the American Academy in Rome (Italy), and MoMA PS1 (New York), among others. She is working on a major project for MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Hauft’s many honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the St. Gaudens Foundation, and the Howard Foundation, as well as grants from the Public Art Fund in New York and the PEW Foundation Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. She has been awarded residencies to work internationally, including the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbria, Italy, and the International Artists’ Residency Fellowship in Łódź, Poland.

For 14 years, Hauft taught at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where she moved from assistant to full professor. In 2004, she was appointed chair of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose graduate sculpture program was ranked first in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for her entire tenure. In 2012, Hauft was named the Leslie Waggener Professor in Sculpture in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Art & Art History, where she ran the MFA in Studio Art program. In 2019, she was appointed director of the College of Art and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, and has now established her studio in St. Louis.

Aurora Kamimura, PhD, (she/her/ella) is a lecturer in education and Assistant Provost for Inclusive Excellence at Washington University in St. Louis. Her teaching, research, and administrative career of over 20 years has been founded on broadening access, equity, and diversity in the P-20/professoriate pathway. She has been fortunate to work on these issues at the local, state, and national level throughout her career. Moreover, at each stage of Kamimura’s career, equity and equitable organizations remain central to her values and work.

As a mixed methodology social scientist and equity-centered positive organizational scholar, Kamimura’s current research focuses on organizational change mechanisms required to diversify the professoriate, which has aligned with her prior research on equitable practices in education. Some of Kamimura’s earliest research focused on enhancing college access for Latinx/a/o, immigrant, and undocumented students. This research was conducted primarily through the National Center for Institutional Diversity and the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, both at the University of Michigan. Her research agenda expanded to encompass strategies for diversifying STEM graduate programs, by specifically focusing on equity-centered admission practices.

As an instructor, Kamimura has felt honored to teach on various campuses for undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences – racially/ethnically, gender, socioeconomically, age, regionally, and disciplinary. In addition to her time here as a lecturer, she has taught courses for the University of Michigan, University of Louisville, University of California, Irvine, University of North Texas, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, and Indiana State University, in the areas of higher education, organizational behavior, and sociology. While teaching at these diverse campuses, she gained pedagogical expertise that she uses to enhance her skillset as a lecturer on a daily basis.

Kamimura’s teaching experience is complimented by expansive capacity as a facilitator, including serving as a teaching consultant for the Center on Research for Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan. At CRLT, she facilitated workshops on topics, including “Inclusive Teaching During the First Week and Beyond” and “Facilitating Classroom Discussions in the Social Sciences.” Her teaching philosophy is grounded in the techniques and strategies she learned through the Program on Intergroup Relations, which works to develop inclusive learning spaces across diversity. As a professor, Kamimura continuously work to leverage her research and administrative expertise to enhance the learning environment. Through these varying and in-depth experiences, she has come to be sought as an expert on inclusive teaching strategies nationally, and been invited as a guest panelist on webinars and podcasts to discuss success strategies.

Kamimura’s research and teaching are complimented by her professional work in the K-16 pathway at the brink of student affairs and academic affairs in various units, including Outreach, Service Learning, Multicultural Affairs, Academic Support Services, and as an Associate Dean. Kamimura also currently serves as the Assistant Provost for Inclusive Excellence where she works on developing and implementing strategies to diversify our faculty and to provide more inclusive learning environments in our classrooms around campus. At a national level, Kamimura serves as the Treasurer-Elect on the Board of Directors for the American Association of Hispanics for Higher Education (AAHHE), and is involved in several national projects focused on the development of Latinx/a/o leadership.

Heidi Aronson Kolk (she/her) is a cultural historian who began academic life as a visual artist and poet, and pursued graduate study in literary history and American culture studies. Her research explores the politics and practices of memory in the United States, and engages creatively with the history and landscape of the American city, drawing upon the rich visual and material culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is especially attentive to issues of race and urban identity, disputes over public history, and concepts of materiality and trauma. Her first book, Taking Possession: The Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), engages many of these subjects, focusing on an intensively preserved historic house near downtown St. Louis. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has noted in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, such a place is “[t]oo solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid,” and thus “embod[ies] the ambiguities of history.” Its alluring “concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We [can] imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?”

Kolk’s second book project takes up the ambiguities of history by attending to “negative heritage” in the United States––a large and under-theorized domain that includes sites and histories that are uncompliant, unruly, or compromised––that have been overlooked, disregarded, hidden from view, or even obliterated, and thus confound the production of history. If many are places of shame, others have inspired dark fixation and folklore, pilgrimage and preservation, and more recently, historical reckoning and memory activism. Attending to the complex dynamics and histories, the book argues for negative heritage as a revelatory feature of American culture and identity.

Kolk is also co-editor, with Iver Bernstein, of The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson, a book-length collection of essays (289 pp., 2022). The publication––which is the culmination of an American Culture Studies Faculty Program Initiative launched in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown––interrogates the material histories and lived experiences of the segregated city.

And Kolk is co-lead-investigator, with Kelley Van Dyck Murphy (assistant professor of architecture, Sam Fox School) and Lynnette Widder (Columbia University), on a grant-supported research initiative, “Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Design Legacy of the Interned Generation of Japanese Americans.” Through oral histories, a podcast series, and a digital archive, as well as scholarly publication, the project documents the experiences of Japanese American architects who were interned briefly before enrolling at Washington University, and went on to make vital contributions to the post-war architecture and design landscape of the United States, paying special attention to the foundational effects of detention and the pressures of post-war assimilation.

New York-based artist Marie Lorenz’s (she/her) work is rooted in the exploration and narrative of New York City’s waterfronts. Combining psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms, Lorenz uses boats to create an uncertain space and bring about a heightened awareness of place. In 2005, she started her Tide and Current Taxi project, taking people around the New York Harbor in a boat built from salvaged materials, using the tide to guide her navigation. Solo exhibitions include Waterways, at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College (Bennington, Vt.); Tide and Current Taxi, at the Rib Gallery (Rotterdam, Netherlands); and Graybelt, a multimedia project funded by the Bridging Barriers research initiative, at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenz earned an MFA from Yale.

James McAnally (he/him) is the founder and artistic director of Counterpublic, a triennial civic exhibition that weaves contemporary art into the life of St. Louis. McAnally is the co-founder and executive director of The Luminary, an expansive platform for art, thought, and action based in St. Louis, as well as the co-founder and editor of MARCH: a journal of art and strategy (formerly Temporary Art Review). He also serves as a founding member and chairperson of Common Field, a national network of artist organizations and organizers.

McAnally has presented exhibitions, talks and lectures at venues such as the Walker Art Center, Queens Museum, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation with Ballroom Marfa, The Contemporary, Baltimore, and has served as a visual arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Joan Mitchell Foundation and numerous other fellowships. His publications are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Brooklyn Museum, Getty Research Institute and more and published in Art in America, Hyperallergic, Art Journal, and others. McAnally is a recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing.

Denise Mullen (she/her) served as president of Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, Or.), provost and vice president for academic affairs and research at Alberta College of Art and Design (Calgary, Canada), dean of the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY (Purchase, Ny.), vice dean of the Corcoran College of Art + Design (Washington, DC), chair of the art department and professor at New Jersey City University (Jersey City, Nj.), and visiting associate professor at Pratt Institute, Graduate Fine Arts (Brooklyn, Ny.).

She was president of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, vice president of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, and served on the boards of the College Art Association, the National Council of Arts Administrators, Business and Culture for the Arts in Portland, Or., and the honorary committee for the College Art Association’s 50th anniversary celebration of feminism.

She is currently on the Board of the New York Film Academy and is active as an arts higher education consultant, most recently researching, organizing, and serving as a presenter with leaders in the field on the panel: “Closings and Mergers: Countering the Trend Through the Lens of Small, Private, Non-Profit, Single-Purpose Art and Design Colleges” at the 2022 WSCUC Annual Conference in San Francisco, the 2023 College Art Association Conference in New York City and the 2023 National Council of Art Administrators in St. Louis.

She earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York, a BA in Art from Sweet Briar College in Virginia and attended the Institute for Educational Management: Change Leadership at the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, Harvard University. As a practicing artist, she was represented by Joshua Heller Rare Books in Washington, DC, and has work included in numerous public and private collections.

Eric Paul Mumford (he/him) is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Art History and Archaeology and History in Arts & Sciences, and is a faculty scholar at the Institute for Public Health.

Mumford is an expert on the history of modern architecture and urbanism, and teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture. His books and edited volumes include Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850 (2018); The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (2000); Modern Architecture in St. Louis: Washington University and postwar American architecture, 1948-1973 (2004); Josep Lluís Sert: the architect of urban design (2008); Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline (2009); and The Writings of Josep Lluís Sert (2015). In 2013, he was a Fulbright Specialist in urban planning at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, and in 2014 he received a collaborative grant from the MIT Global Architectural History Teaching Consortium. He is currently the curator and catalogue editor of the Le Corbusier section of Ando and Le Corbusier at Alphawood Exhibitions, a new, Tadao Ando-designed gallery in Chicago.

Mumford is a graduate of Harvard University (1980) and earned his MArch at MIT in 1983 and his PhD in architecture at Princeton University in 1996. He was chair of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Visiting Committee from 2011-14.

Deborah Obalil (she/her) has over 25 years of experience as a leader in the North American arts and culture industry, having led multiple highly-acclaimed organizations and served as a well-regarded management consultant to the field. She was appointed the executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) in June 2012, and then president in fall 2015. As president and executive director, she leads the organization in achieving its mission of strengthening and connecting its members schools, thus advancing arts and design education.

Under her leadership, AICAD has invested significantly in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the organization and across its membership. During her tenure, AICAD has launched the Post Graduate Teaching Fellowship, which offers professional development to graduating BIPOC students in the association in pursuit of careers teaching in higher education, and the BIPOC Academic Leadership Institute. AICAD has hosted multiple symposia on diversity in the academy and inclusive pedagogy, and is now the recipient of a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to center social justice in arts and design higher education.

Corin Pursell (he/they) is an archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of the mound building Mississippian Cultures, Native peoples of the Midwestern and Southeastern United States.

They are currently involved in research in the eastern quarter of the preeminent indigenous center of Cahokia Mounds, supported by Washington University in St. Louis and the Powell Archaeological Research Center. Corin also teaches at Saint Louis University.

Additional previous research and fieldwork has focused on Shiloh Mounds (2002-2004), Kincaid Mounds (2005-2016), and Winterville Mounds (2016-2017).

Jennifer Rissler, PhD, (she/her) holds a doctorate in philosophy, aesthetics, and visual studies from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her research focuses on the intersection of poststructuralism and California post studio practice. She is president of the board of directors of the College Art Association (CAA) and chair emerita of the Committee on Women in the Arts. Rissler also is president emerita of ArtTable, Inc.–the leading national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing women’s professional leadership in the visual arts–a former trustee of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Me.), a founding board member of Oakwood Arts (Richmond, Va.), and dean emerita of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).

As the chief operating officer at Peabody Essex Museum, Kurt Steinberg, Ed.D., takes a purpose driven approach to achieve meaningful results through support of staff and active engagement in the community. He has been an authority in operations and arts administration for over 20 years.

Most recently, he was the eighth president of Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, Mass.) on Boston’s North Shore. This followed 12 years as executive vice president and acting president at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Steinberg’s focus has been to promote the ideas of a creative life; a mutual commitment made between the college, its students and its alumni to a lifelong relationship of helping artists, designers and artist educators achieve their creative goals. He strongly believes in fostering the diversity of creating traditions as a way to challenge both students and faculty to expand their social and global awareness. In support of these ideas, he focused on the expansion of Montserrat’s presence internationally and nationally through affiliations in China, Bahamas, Japan, India, the New World in Miami, Florida, and NOCCA, Louisiana’s arts conservatory.

Steinberg has lectured on nonprofit finance, inclusive planning, nonprofit fundraising and community relations, as well as the power of innovation and design through art education in China, Japan, India and the United States. He continues to participate in site visits for the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE), the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) and the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD). He serves on the boards of the North Shore Alliance for Economic Development, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, the Danforth Art Museum Alliance and as a commissioner of the Essex National Heritage Commission. He most recently served as a nominator for the Boston Foundation/Brother Thomas Fellowship, treasurer and executive committee member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design, and as secretary on the NASAD executive committee.

Steinberg holds a bachelor of arts in international relations from Syracuse University and a master of public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He earned his doctorate in organizational leadership from Northeastern University.