BARBARA BROWN WILSON, Assistant Professor of Environmental Planning, University of Virginia
Barbara Brown Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Planning in the UVa School of Architecture. Her research and teaching focus on the ethics, theory, and practice of sustainable development, community engaged design, and the history of urban social movements. Her research is often change-oriented—she collaborates with real community partners to identify opportunities for engaged and integrated sustainable development. Her current projects include finishing a ten year effort with the City of Austin to create an Alley Greening Program; researching sustainable retrofitting strategies that preserve unsubsidized affordable housing; developing tools for public engagement around complex sustainability problems; and identifying pathways to support leadership equity in public interest design (PID) practice. Her community-engaged research has received local and national recognition, and she looks forward to contributing energy toward collaborations in the Charlottesville region. 

JESS GARZ

CHRISTINE GASPAR

THERESA HWANG, Director of Community Design and Planning, Skid Row Housing Trust
Theresa Hwang is the Director of Community Design and Planning at the Skid Row Housing Trust, a non-profit permanent supportive housing organization where she was the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow from 2009-2012. She implements community organizing strategies and participatory design processes to influence and shape the built environment with the resident community in a historically under-resourced and under-recognized neighborhoods. Theresa is an adjunct studio professor at Woodbury University and has previously co-taught at the University of Southern California.  She is on the Board of Directors for the Association for Community Design.  She received her Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design (2007) and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and Art History from the Johns Hopkins University (2001) and is a LEED accredited professional.

NICOLE JOSLIN, Research Fellow, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple
After working for Architecture for Humanity on a Hurricane Katrina recovery program in Biloxi, MS, Nicole moved to Austin and co-founded Women.Design.Build to provide more opportunities for women to engage in community driven design and construction activities. She concurrently worked for the architecture firm BOKA Powell on local mixed-use developments and received her architectural license in 2012 before completing a Master’s in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas. Nicole returned to the Gulf Coast in 2014 for a research fellowship at architecture and planning firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple. Her academic, planning, architecture, and community experience continues to inform her research at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple about community engagement in professional design practice.

LIZ OGBU, Independent Consultant, Studio O
A designer and social change agent, Liz is an expert on social and spatial innovation in challenged urban environments. Through her multidisciplinary consulting practice, Studio O, and courses she teaches at UC Berkeley and Stanford’s d.school, she collaborates with communities in need to use the power of design to tackle wicked social problems. Previously, she was Innovator-in-Residence at IDEO.org and Design Director at Public Architecture.

KATIE SWENSON, Vice President, National Design Initiatives, Enterprise Community Partners
Katie Swenson oversees Enterprise’s National Design Initiatives, including the Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute (AHDLI) and the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship, a program uniquely designed to nurture a new generation of community architects. After completing her own Enterprise Rose Fellowship, Katie founded the Charlottesville Community Design Center and led it to establish, with Habitat for Humanity, an influential and acclaimed international design competition. The competition’s innovative lessons are recounted in the publication Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model, which Katie co-authored with William Morrish and Susanne Schindler. Katie is a national leader in sustainable design for low-income communities, recently named an emerging leader by the Design Futures Council, and to Steelcase’s prestigious Green Giant list. Katie holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from UC-Berkeley and a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia.