Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees has elected four distinguished new members: architect and professional engineer Evan Akselrad (effective December 11, 2025); artist and Pratt Professor Emerita Iona Fromboluti (effective July 1, 2026); occupational therapist Zara Harris (effective October 23, 2025); and entrepreneur and investor Michael Schafler (effective July 1, 2026).
Board of Trustees member Katharine L. McKenna, MID ’84, became trustee emerita effective July 1, 2026. McKenna, who graduated from Pratt with a master’s in industrial design in 1984, joined Pratt’s Board of Trustees in 2002, where she served on the student affairs committee, including as the committee chair since March 2025. She has been a longtime philanthropic supporter and deeply engaged member of the Pratt community. McKenna is an accomplished artist, writer, and designer. Her paintings are in permanent collections of The Rockwell Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Booth Museum, the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, and the Desert Caballeros Museum in Wickenburg, AZ.
Learn more about the newly elected trustees below:
Evan Akselrad’s appointment to Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees was effective on December 11, 2025.
Evan Akselrad is an architect and structural engineer with more than four decades of experience spanning architecture, structural engineering, teaching, and expert witness testimony. He has built a distinguished career at the intersection of design, engineering, and construction, with particular expertise in renovation, restoration, adaptive reuse, and complex structural interventions. Akselrad is the founder and former president of Anchor Consulting Architects and Engineers, a practice he established in 1989 that went on to complete more than 1,500 projects. Under his leadership, the firm developed a broad and diverse portfolio that included industrial, residential, institutional, and commercial buildings, as well as art and sculpture installations. Its work encompassed projects ranging from retail environments and private residences to museums, schools, historic structures, and public art installations.
Throughout his career, Akselrad has contributed structural and architectural expertise to a wide range of notable projects and institutions. His work has included projects for numerous national retail stores, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Dallas Museum of Art, Judson Memorial Church, and the Dakota Apartments in New York City, among many others. He has also worked on sculpture and memorial installations, including the Suffolk County 9/11 Memorial, Bryant Park installations, and public art projects in Brooklyn and beyond.
In addition to his design and engineering practice, Akselrad has served as an expert consultant and witness in technically complex legal matters involving accessibility, structural engineering, reinforced concrete design, construction processes, and building code compliance. His consulting has included work related to public transportation infrastructure and New York City construction litigation, reflecting the depth of his technical knowledge and his ability to apply engineering judgment in high-stakes settings.
A committed educator, Akselrad has taught structural design and engineering for decades at leading architecture schools in New York. He has served on the faculty of Pratt Institute since 2007, teaching structural and technical design courses, and served as coordinator for the structures group with the undergraduate School of Architecture. He has also taught at Parsons School of Design during the accreditation of its Master of Architecture program and at The City College of New York, where he taught under renowned structural engineer Horst Berger. Through this work, he has helped shape generations of architects in the technical and structural foundations of design practice.
Earlier in his career, Akselrad held engineering and project management roles at Robert Silman Associates, Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation, M.G. McLaren, and Springland Associates. These positions gave him experience across historic preservation, nuclear and industrial facilities, marine structures, and luxury residential development and established the multidisciplinary foundation that has defined his professional life.
Akselrad’s work has been recognized with a Concrete Industry Board Merit Award, and projects associated with his practice have been featured in Architectural Record and The New York Times. He holds both a bachelor of science in civil engineering and a bachelor of science in architecture from The City College of New York. Today, Akselrad continues to provide advice to architects, owners, contractors, attorneys, and community organizations on structural, architectural, and construction matters while remaining active in pro bono work.
Iona Fromboluti’s appointment to Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees was effective on July 1, 2026.
Iona Fromboluti is a practicing artist, a trustee of the Speyer Family Foundation and the Nora Speyer & Sideo Fromboluti Foundation, and a professor emerita at Pratt Institute.
Fromboluti has been living, working, and exhibiting since the early 1970s. Her exhibition venues include institutions in the US and abroad.
In 1990, she began her teaching relationship with Pratt Institute. She taught at the Institute for 30 years, becoming a full, tenured professor, and held the position of coordinator of Light, Color, and Design to faculty in the Foundation Department for 15 years. In this role, she was instrumental in developing the curriculum for this foundation core course. During her time at Pratt, she served on both departmental and Institute-wide committees, most notably as a faculty trustee and on a presidentially selected committee to review the bylaws of the senate.
A longtime advocate for the Institute, she, through the Speyer Family Foundation, awarded a scholarship for the Foundation Merit Scholarship Competition for more than 10 years.
Fromboluti and her husband, Professor Douglas Wirls, during their many years of teaching in the Foundation Department, saw the need to create a space dedicated to supporting the foundation curriculum while also providing a resource for creative inquiry for the department and the Institute at large, with a primary emphasis on nature. Through their sponsorship, in collaboration with Pratt Institute, the Foundations Lab is now a valued asset within the Institute.
Fromboluti was born and raised in New York City, received her BFA from Tyler School of Fine Art in Philadelphia, and studied in programs at Skowhegan and Boston University at Tanglewood. She has lived in Brooklyn for the last 35 years.
Zara Harris’s appointment to Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees was effective on October 23, 2025.
Zara Harris is a retired Anglo/American occupational therapist with a distinguished international career. She holds a master of science in occupational therapy (MSOT), is a member of the Royal College of Occupational Therapy (MRCOT), and is a registered (US) Occupational Therapist (OTR). She and her husband Dan Harris, a U.S. diplomat, lived and served in eight countries on four continents. She earned her master of science in occupational therapy at Brunel University in London, United Kingdom, and has held her U.S. registration and license since 1988.
Over the course of her career, she held leadership roles, including head occupational therapist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, and worked in a wide range of clinical and educational settings, including the Lab School of Washington, DC, and several international schools.
Harris has also maintained private occupational therapy practices in Argentina, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Germany, France, and the United States, bringing a global perspective to her work with children and families.
Throughout her career, Harris has presented widely on topics such as ADHD, handwriting, executive function, and time blindness at conferences, including those of the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), the World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT), CHADD, ADDISS, and the Learning Disabilities Association. She has also published articles in the WFOT Journal, Occupational Therapy Practice, and Attention magazine. Her professional strengths include clinical teaching, international program development, and multilingual communication, including fluency in French.
Harris is currently the vice-president of the Haiti Rehabilitation Foundation Board, which started and supports the only occupational and physical therapy program in Haiti. She teaches their developmental psychology course annually in French. She also serves on the board of the preschool and kindergarten at her church in Vienna, Virginia.
Outside of her professional work, Harris currently lives in Vienna, Virginia, and enjoys choral singing, quilting and crafting, supporting several Afghan refugee families, traveling, and spending time with her two sons and four grandchildren.
Both of her sons were born in Glen Cove, Long Island, and she has followed her grandmother and father’s interest in Pratt Institute, started by her great-great-grandfather, Charles Pratt.
Michael Schafler’s appointment to Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees was effective on July 1, 2026.
Michael Schafler is a New York City–based design and e-commerce technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the cofounder of InHouse, a seed-stage AI interior design and spatial commerce startup, and the cofounder of Trade Coffee, the world’s largest specialty coffee subscription marketplace.
Prior to his founder roles, Schafler worked as a designer at ECCO Design and later as a consultant to rapidly scaling, venture-backed startups, including Plated, Supergoop!, Ollie Pet, and M. Gemi. His background in process-driven design pairs with deep, frontier-level fluency in generative AI alongside traditional 3D CAD and visualization.
A graduate of Pratt Institute (MID ’14), Schafler has stayed closely engaged with the Pratt community, teaching digital arts and industrial design courses as a visiting professor. He has also participated in post-graduate research with Pratt’s Digital Arts and Humanities Research Center (DAHRC), collaborating with Weill Cornell Medical College to bring design visualization to clinical and scientific initiatives.
Schafler lives in Manhattan with his wife, author Katherine Morgan Schafler, and their daughter, Abigail. As a trustee, Schafler looks forward to bringing his perspectives at the intersection of design, AI, and entrepreneurship, along with his deep ties to New York’s startup community, to the Pratt Board of Trustees.