Powell, Tossin to join WashU Sam Fox School faculty for spring 2026

Powell will serve as the 2025-26 Wallace Herndon Smith Visiting Lecturer, teaching primarily in the Master of Design for Human-Computer Interaction and Emerging Technology. He is an award-winning designer and executive design leader with more than 30 years of experience in a wide range of design disciplines. An alum of the WashU College of Art, Powell received the school’s Distinguished Alumni Award and the AIGA Minnesota Fellow Award, both in 2014. Powell is a lecturer, commentator, and thought leader on design issues. He has presented at a variety of global conferences, forums, and universities, including Beirut Design Week in Lebanon, Fortune’s Brainstorm Design in Singapore, and the Yale School of Management. He was on the jury of the 2018 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. From 2011-2013, Powell served as the national president of AIGA, the professional association for design in the U.S.

In the past decade, Powell served as vice president of design at IBM and Expedia Group, where he oversaw design practices, design systems, and designer career and leadership programs, as well as the scaling of cross-functional design thinking practices across the companies. Alongside his leadership training and coaching practice, he is the producer and host of “This Is A Prototype: The Design Leadership Podcast.”

Tossin is the 2025-26 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil and Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She works with moving-image, sculpture, and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonization. Through a mix of research, storytelling, and gestures of mapping and layering, Tossin places seemingly disparate elements into conversation, generating unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. Tossin’s childhood in Brasília heavily influenced her early films and installations deconstructing Brazil’s modernist history, which over the years has expanded to encompass geographies ranging from her adopted home of Los Angeles to the vast realms of outer space. She was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and in “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home,” in New Orleans. As the Freund Fellow, she will teach in the College of Art and develop her work in preparation for an exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum next year.