Ali Ghazvinian is a civil and architectural engineer interested in integrative design among different disciplines. He works on the border of computational design, biodesign, and material tinkering. After finishing his bachelor’s and master’s studies at the University of Tehran, Iran, he began his Ph.D. studies in architecture at Penn State. Currently, he works on the structural use of bio-based materials made of fungi and the hybridization of this material with knitted textile.

Benay Gürsoy is an assistant professor of architecture and the founder and director of Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab within the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State. Her research and teaching focus is on computational making, digital fabrication, biofabrication, and shape studies. Gürsoy completed her doctoral studies in the Architectural Design Computing program at Istanbul Technical University in 2016 and was awarded the Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award by the Graduate School of Science, Engineering, and Technology. She has published and presented her research internationally and received awards, including the 2010 Young Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) Award, 2015 Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) Futures Best Paper Award, 2021 American Institute of Architects UpJohn Research Initiative, and 2022 SOM Foundation Research Prize (together with Felecia Davis, Farzaneh Oghazian, and Ali Ghazvinian).

Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University in English literature and a M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 01SJ Biennial, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Sundance Channel. Her honors include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination. Her work has been written about in “Hyperallergic,” “Metropolis,” and “Fast Company.”

James Leng and Jennifer Ly are cofounders of Figure, an architecture collective based in San Francisco.

Leng is currently a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was the Harry der Boghosian Teaching Fellow at Syracuse University. Leng has received various accolades such as the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise for immigrant contribution to the arts, the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) Foundation Research Prize for independent research, and the James Templeton Kelley Prize for best graduate thesis. He holds his master’s degree in architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and his B.A. in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ly is a licensed architect in California. She holds her master’s degree in architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of several design honors including the Rotch Traveling Scholarship, Burnham Prize, Harvard’s Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award, and the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. Her work has been published in journals including “Log,” “Cornell Journal of Architecture,” and “The Architectural Review.” She currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carrie McKnelly is a designer and researcher who works at the intersection of computational design and knit material systems. Carrie received a master of architectural studies in computation and design at MIT and a bachelor of architecture from Pratt Institute. From 2015 to 2016, she was the Howard E. LeFevre ’26 Emerging Practitioner Fellow at the Knowlton School of Architecture. McKnelly has taught at Ohio State, Pratt Institute, and MIT. From 2009 to 2013 she designed and fabricated award-winning, large-scale installations at SOFTlab in New York. She is currently a computational designer at Nike and resides in Portland, Oregon.

Virginia Melnyk is a computational and material designer with a background in architectural design and craft. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the DigitalFUTURES International Ph.D. program at Tongji University under her adviser Philip Yuan. She graduated with a master of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzmann School of Design in 2010 and she holds a B.S. in architecture from the University at Buffalo. Her research interests consist of textiles, tensegrity, and transformability. Her experience in digital fabrication, computational design, craft, and feminist culture all are integrated into her research. Exploring applications for temporary light-weight structures, her work balances between digital and craft, working with her hands equally as often as digital fabrication tools. She previously worked at HWKN, Acconci Studio, Emergent Architecture, and Studio Pei Zhu in Beijing. She volunteers as a working team member of U.S. Architects Declare, steering committee member and organizer at DigitalFUTURES, and faculty mentor at Architecture if Free. She currently is a research assistant at University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Tsz Yan Ng’s material-based research and design primarily focus on experimental concrete forming (hard) and textile manipulation (soft), often times in direct exchange, incorporating contemporary technologies to develop novel designs for building and manufacturing. A common thread to her work investigates questions of labor in various facets and forms – underscoring broader issues of industrial manufacturing innovation, human labor, crafting, and aesthetics. She received an R+D Award from “Architect Magazine” for Robotic Needle Felting and, more recently, was recognized with The Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices Award. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Farzaneh Oghazian is a Ph.D. architecture candidate and researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computation at Penn State. Her research focuses on developing computational methods to enhance the implementation of knits as materials for architectural application. Oghazian is currently a research assistant with the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB), doing research on the large-scale application of the knitted textiles under the supervision of Felecia Davis. She also is affiliated with the Building Design Group at Penn State and does research on optimization and developing machine learning models under the supervision of Nathan Brown. Oghazian’s collaborative research work has gained recognition in the form of the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) Foundation Prize 2021 for MycoKnit and the “Black Flower Antenna” installation as part of the “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021.

Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Opazo immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. She completed her bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the University of California, Berkley in 2016 and her master of fine arts at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2020. Opazo has exhibited works across the United States and Latin America, including the Museum of Visual Art of Santiago, Chile, CAM gallery at Carnegie Museum of the Arts, ACRE gallery in Chicago, and the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara. In Los Angeles, her work has been shown at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Dab Art Co. Gallery, and CalArts. She has been awarded with various residencies from the Banff Art Center, Arts Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, The Reef Residency, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and Mass Moca. She recently had her work published by “Artforum” and “Lumzine Art Magazine.”

Website: mingaopazo.com

Sharbreon Plummer is an artist, strategist, storyteller, and educator with more than a decade of experience in arts and community engagement roles. Her upbringing in southern Louisiana informs her interest and investment in how culture and ancestral memory act as influencers of personal expression and contemporary work, specifically within the African Diaspora and Global South. Plummer writes, “Fiber has always made me feel connected to home. Literally and figuratively. I am continuously fascinated by the role that textiles, fiber art, and materiality have on our lives and practices as people of the African Diaspora. Diasporic Threads is a space to explore the connections fiber artists/makers/communities have made (and have yet to uncover) between one another, our creativity, and our heritage. To highlight the work that often goes unrecognized. To connect the diasporic threads.”

Lavender Tessmer is a doctoral student in design and computation at the MIT where her research explores mass customization in design and textiles. Her current work investigates design-to-fabrication workflows for textile applications in garments and architectural structures. As a research assistant at the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, she developed climate-responsive textiles, adaptable garments, and custom-made fibers. She has taught design studios in digital fabrication at Washington University in St. Louis and MIT, and her recent design work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Seaport Common in Boston.

Elena is an architecture doctoral candidate in the Design Computing cluster at Penn State. She holds an master of science degree in architecture and a graduate degree in additive manufacturing from Penn State. Her research focuses on smart materials for adaptive architecture. Vazquez’s work has gained recognition in the form of awards and grants such as the American Institute of Architects Upjohn Research Initiative Grant and the Architectural Research Centers Consortium Research Incentive Award. In addition, she has extensively published in computer-aided architectural design proceedings, including Education and Research in Computer-aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe), Ibero-american Society of Digital Graphics (SIGraDi), Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), and Computer-Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) Futures, and in peer-reviewed journals. Vazquez is a 2016-2018 Fulbright scholar and a 2020-2021 Waddell Biggart Graduate Fellow.

Yasmine Abbas (D.Des., Harvard University Graduate School of Design) is an assistant teaching professor of architecture at Penn State. Her research explores contemporary mobilities – physical, digital and mental, identity, and place making. She co-founded the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge 2013, the 2017 SEED award for Public Interest Design, and Le Monde Urban Innovation Award – Citizen Engagement, Le Monde Cities (2020).

Erin Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate in Textile Design at The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. Her doctoral research explores the interactive space between structural textile design and electromagnetic fields. She employs artistic methods and designs custom electronic tools to explore the aesthetic and expressional possibilities of this otherwise non-visual and intangible phenomena. Prior to her studies in Sweden, Lewis was a researcher and instructor of wearable technologies in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She previously held the position of education manager at Canada’s leading new media art gallery, Inter/Access, in Toronto.

Darla V. Lindberg is a professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State. Her research and teaching in design, architecture, and systems science examines complexity (fine grain) and systems (broad brush) influences on the ways built, behavioral, cultural, political, and environmental influences affect health and society around the globe. Her model explores the feedbacks/policy formation between human behavior (game theory), commons environments (at-risk), and institutional design. Tropes such as maps and models form the basis for analyzing ways design and architecture shape policy and critical reform affecting social and environmental justice.