Finalists announced for 2026 Steedman Fellowship
2026-03-20 • Sam Fox School
Eight finalists have been selected for the James Harrison Steedman Fellowship in Architecture. Now marking its 100th year, the Steedman Fellowship is among the oldest and most prestigious awards in the U.S. Past winners include celebrated architects such as George Hellmuth and Yung-Ho Chan. The newly increased $100,000 award is granted biennially to an emerging architect to support 6-12 months of international travel for architectural research. Administered by the Sam Fox School at WashU and AIA St. Louis, the fellowship is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, who has earned an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years.
The finalists are Ekin Bilal, Georgina Bowman, Andres Camacho, Catherine Chen, Clare Fentress, Inmo Kang, Lucy Satzewich, and Inhwan Tae. They were selected by a jury chaired by Neeraj Bhatia and including Professor Patty Heyda, Nahyun Hwang, Jack Self, and Peter Tao. The jury will choose a winner to be announced later this spring.
“Travel operates as a critical instrument for unsettling our own biases, opening up comparative readings across cultures, urbanisms, and modes of living,” Bhatia shared. “In this sense, the fellowship creates a rare space for emerging architects to engage contexts beyond their immediate horizons, returning with ideas that productively challenge the status quo.” Bhatia also noted how this year’s theme asks architects to reconsider the nature of the collective — how it is constituted, how it is spatialized, and architecture’s role in both convening publics and giving form to shared arrangements.
Finalists submitted proposals on this year’s theme, Collective Form/Forums, which draws inspiration from Fumihiko Maki’s 1964 manifesto, “Investigations in Collective Form.” Maki’s career was closely intertwined with WashU, from serving on the architecture faculty as a recent graduate and founding the school’s Master of Urban Design program, to his built work on campus including Steinberg Hall, Walker Hall, and the Kemper Art Museum.
“Investigations in Collective Form” grapples with architecture’s role in an increasingly pluralistic society, with growing heterogeneity of institutions, and rapidly changing technologies and methods of communication that were affecting regional cultures. For Maki, Collective Form emerged when buildings came together to produce something larger than the sum of their parts. As similar challenges loom on the horizon today, jurors sought mindful proposals on architecture’s role in producing collective forms/forums that catalyze a more politically engaged discipline and citizenry.
Ekin Bilal is an architectural designer and researcher whose work explores spaces and materials often pushed to the back of architectural discourse. Through speculative design and representation, he examines the regulatory and economic paper trail that shapes architecture, reimagining how overlooked systems and spaces can offer alternative modes of spatial agency. He is a cofounder of NOT NOT, a design practice operating across architecture, objects, and stories to foreground latent spatial and material conditions. Bilal previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from MIT. He has practiced with New Affiliates, Bureau Spectacular, MIT Urban Risk Lab, and Collective Studio, among others. He contributed to work exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023, 2025), Salone del Mobile Milano (2019), and the Timișoara Architecture Biennial (2025). His drawing series “Goff, Revisited,” produced with New Affiliates, has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Georgina Bowman is an architectural designer, carpenter, and educator whose practice focuses on working with regional supply chains and participatory construction methods as an approach towards increased spatial agency and access to the built (ecological and architectural) environment. After earning her Master of Architecture at the Architectural Association’s timber-focused Design and Make program in the U.K., she co-founded the design-build studio Common Practice which seeks to reconnect communities to their surrounding productive landscapes.
Andres Camacho is a designer practicing in Miami and Chicago, where he also teaches design studios at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is a graduate of Harvard University’s Master of Architecture program and holds a Bachelor of Design from the University of Florida. His career has been shaped by the diverse environments, cultures, and methods of making he has been immersed in while working for notable firms in Zurich, Mexico City, Miami, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
Catherine Chen is an architectural designer whose work and research focus on the intersections between public space, infrastructure, and collective life. She is interested in questions of publicness and the socio-spatial reciprocity that architecture can enable. Chen holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she was the recipient of the Alpha Rho Chi medal, and a Bachelor of Arts in studio art and physics from Colgate University.
Chen is a visiting critic at Cornell University, where she teaches studios and seminars, and advises on design thesis projects. In both practice and teaching, her work posits architecture as a civic project shaped by surplus, circular economies, and infrastructural entanglements. Previously, she has held teaching positions at Harvard and practiced in Zurich, Boston, Princeton, and New York, with the offices of Karamuk Kuo Architekten, Höweler + Yoon, JaJa Co, and Studio Sean Canty, among others. She has worked on a wide range of projects and competitions, from housing and exhibitions to civic infrastructure and education.
Clare Fentress is a designer and writer. Her work is concerned with the politics and poetics of architecture, labor, and caretaking space. She is a founding member of Acritarchy, a design collective based in New York, and an associate editor at n+1. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Avery Review, the New York Review of Architecture, and n+1 online, and her visual work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
A 2025 MacDowell Fellow, Fentress developed a book manuscript on visionary hospice space in the United States from the 1970s to the present. She focused on a chapter on San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project Guest House (1990–2018).
Inmo Kang is an architectural designer and an educator with a strong interest in systems-oriented way of thinking and design and experience in public architecture, exhibition design, and participatory design process. She is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute, and she earned her undergraduate architecture degree at WashU and Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Before coming to Pratt, Inmo taught within the early design education program at Harvard GSD. Professionally, she has trained in the international offices of Herzog & de Meuron, Pang Architects, and Samoo Architects and Engineers, having contributed to projects within global context. Her personal research work has been supported by global institutions such as the SRISA Gallery of Florence, Harvard GSD Kirkland Gallery, the Salata Institute, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Harvard GSD Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab).
Lucy Satzewich is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary foundations at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette School of Architecture and Design. For the past 10 years, her practice and research have focused on how design can contribute to making everything from cities to classrooms healthier and more equitable for all people. She earned her undergraduate degree in cultural studies from McGill University and a diploma in cabinetmaking from Rosemont Technology Center in Montreal. She then earned a Master of Architecture from Tulane University, where she received the AIA-AAHF FHER Griffin/McKahan/Zilm Fellowship on the topic of harm reduction in design.
Inhwan “Ivan” Tae is an architectural designer and co-founding principal of studio in( )ir. He previously practiced in New York, Boston, and Providence. Designing immersive spaces with attention to material expressions, he supports his work through processes of making, exploring concepts of cultural multiplicities and material cultures in both built environments and ceramic sculptures. He was a Center for Collaborative Art and Media Studio Fellow.
Tae earned a Master of Architecture from Yale University, where he was awarded the William Wirt Winchester Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tae has taught summer programs at RISD, served on various reviews, and is an assistant teaching professor of architecture at Ball State University.
