Aug 26, 2025
Dear Pratt Community,
Welcome to the 2025–26 school year. Move-in days and orientation week full of introductions, tours, block parties and game night, events for parents, and the annual Brooklyn Bridge sunrise walk (which was featured in The New York Times) have been an inspiring launch to an exciting new year. These key moments represent the growth of our extraordinarily strong and open community.
This year, we are on track to enroll 1,430 new students and 3,430 returning students, and it’s great to see you fill the campus and the streets around Pratt. We also welcome our new vice president, Dr. Vernese Edghill-Walden, to lead our inclusion and belonging efforts; a new dean, Dr. Peter West, at the helm of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; 11 new full-time faculty across all schools; as well as two new chairs and new directors of academic programs.
Our next strategic plan, with a view to the future of innovative education, including expansive programming, emerging technologies, and fiscal responsibility, is well on its way to completion with associated key performance indicators. The final draft will be reviewed by faculty and administration and presented to the Board of Trustees in October.
During the summer months, enhancements to campus facilities, from classrooms to labs and residence halls, have been accomplished, including the expansion of Digital Arts Department space in Myrtle Hall and the reconfiguration of studio and classroom spaces for the Architecture and Design programs at the Pfizer Building. Renovations to the new Health and Wellness Center are underway for completion later this year.
Pratt will host the 2025 Symposium “Engaging Values” for the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) in November. Two exhibitions opened and will continue into September: “Process in Practice,” presenting the work of Communications Design alums at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and Exquisite Relations, featuring 16 students and alums from the School of Art at the Schafler Gallery on the Brooklyn campus. 70 Years [+] Pratt School of Architecture: An Ongoing Story will continue on the first floor of Higgins Hall through November. Keep an eye on the Pratt events calendar throughout the year.
Being in Brooklyn and NYC, our campuses and our daily world expand to a myriad of art and cultural institutions—museums, art galleries, performance venues, public installations, parks, and green spaces to congregate (many free or discounted with your Pratt ID)—to explore and make into your own creative cauldron.
We also approach the coming year with caution and tempered optimism. We are preparing for some unprecedented times ahead, both nationally and globally, and their direct effects on our own community, operations, and finances.
As I shared with the new students and faculty, at Pratt, we learn through doing, through making, through creative processes that are embodied and immersive. This is central to the Pratt experience, as we generate new ways of thinking and hone new skills. This year, we all will take risks and venture into innovative spaces with great self-discipline and perseverance. We do this, striving to be the visionaries that people look for us to be—framing critical questions in unexpected ways and developing solutions both to ordinary and to urgent problems in the world. This will require patience, hard work, and intellectual openness. It will ask us to appreciate each other, to make space for those with whom we disagree, and to create a place of respectful inquiry and dialogue.
With this new year, the work of investigating, creating, designing, building, teaching, and understanding lies ahead in our classrooms and studios, residence halls, offices, and across our campuses and in the neighborhoods where Pratt has a presence. Pratt is a laboratory for engaged discourse and seminal work, a learning community where we come together to explore and share experiences and ideas with passion and commitment.
Wishing you a great semester,
Frances Bronet