A roundup of ideas and projects from around the Institute
Alyse Dees, MS Urban and Community Planning ’27, received the 2025 American Planning Association (APA) Foundation Diversity Scholarship. Dees is “interested in the intersection of architecture and urbanism because she views it as an opportunity to fuse creative storytelling with community engagement to build towards an equitable future,” School of Architecture News notes.
Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor in School of Information Chris Alen Sula and Chair of Research and Collection Development and Visiting Assistant Professor Amy Ballmer have published a paper with alum Radhika Phansalkar, MSIXD ’25, titled “OER Among the Creative Disciplines: A Survey of Faculty Attitudes Toward OER at a Special-Focus Institution” in the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education.
Pratt Trustee Mickalene Thomas, BFA Fine Arts ’00, is the first African-American artist to have a major solo exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Her retrospective exhibition All About Love “invites audiences to enter a universe of love, leisure, and liberation, spaces where beauty, intimacy, and self-possession reshape the art historical gaze.”
Alumni stepped up to leadership roles at the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York. Stephanie Neel, MSLIS ’15, is now the president, Herbert Durán, MSLIS ’21, is the director of education, and Elizabeth Kobert, MSLIS ’19, is the director of publications. Faculty and staff are leaders as well: Visiting Assistant Professor Cara Dellatte is the director of membership, and DPOE-N Program Manager Kirk Mudle is the director of advocacy.
Six Pratt grads created designs for the NYCxDesign “Ode to NYC” poster campaign: Sakarit Chankaew, BFA Communications Design ’25; Isabel Chun, MFA Communications Design ’25; Mallory Kurkjian, BFA Communications Design ’25; Yua Maekawa, BFA Communications Design ’25; Catherine Nina, BFA Communications Design ’24; and Aidan Wesighan, BFA Communications Design ’25.
Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow Alex Strada joined Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Gaby Collins-Fernandez for a conversation on The Brooklyn Rail’s “The New Social Environment” about Strada’s new citywide public artwork, Public Address.
Adjunct Professor – CCE of Industrial Design Irvin Tepper was featured in a Wall Street Journal article about his collection of fountain pens. “Writing with the German-made pen, Tepper says, is ‘almost like riding a wild horse’ because it’s a larger pen with an extremely smooth nib.”
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice Carlos Motta was named the 2025–26 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism from Bard College. As the Keith Haring Chair, he will be a fellow at Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) and the Bard Human Rights Program, will teach a class across departments, and will deliver a lecture in the spring. Motta will continue to do his work at Pratt simultaneously with this fellowship in the spring semester.
The Chicago Reader reviewed Cornerstone, a solo exhibition in Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center by Yasmin Spiro, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’99; MFA Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) ’04. “Sound and smell aren’t the only senses Spiro engages to focus attention on the question of home. For her, materiality is central; each element of her work is layered with reference, history, and memory, revealing how our ideas of home are bound by our relationship to the land and the things we build upon it.”
Nat Mesnard, visiting instructor of associate degrees, describes how they developed the role-playing card game Assemblage in an article for Edge Effects. “Beginning with archetypes, Dream Askew invites players to develop the game’s narrative foundation through emergent conversations on character relationships. Assemblage, I decided, would be similar: in conversation, my players would define not just single characters, but entire species—a collection of simultaneous, overlapping ‘we’ voices.”
From Pratt Institute News
From Pratt Institute News
