The folks in Inclusive Ecologies bring a range of histories, lived experiences, practices, and ideas to this collaborative space.

Current Organizers

XENIA ADJOUBEI (MA Dip.Arch) is a researcher and architect, Director of AdjoubeiScottWhitby Studio and 2021 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Inclusive Ecologies Incubator, working on proposals for how rural technologies and collective craft practices can improve quality of life in cities. Her research and design projects cover topics such as Degrowth, the New Rural: a village for the future; Art as Labour: how art creates and sustains communities; Virtual Museum in the Open Air: digital mapping of the natural environment. Xenia has run Design Studios in universities in Europe and Russia, is co-founder of the Global Free Unit decentralised network for education and founder of the Nikola-Lenivets Classroom (Russia) a research centre based in the largest art park in Europe. Recently Xenia lead the Sol y Sombra project, which proposes solutions to aid the South American migration crisis through creating digital shared spaces for support and improvement of migrant and host communities' physical environments. Xenia’s interest lies in how new technologies can complement ‘designing through making’ with the hand, which is the subject of the Tectonic Performance: the Science and Craft of Building MA studio she co-teaches with Alejandro Haiek and Carl-Johan Vesterlund in Umeå University, Sweden. @artaslabour

MRINALINI AGGARWAL (MFA) is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. Through a research-led, speculative, and site-specific practice, she creates installations and environments that seek to reconsider the values that spaces offer, and the ways through which they mediate human relationships. Her works often respond to the hegemonic histories of urban design projects within contemporary global cities. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Mrinalini has an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition Design from the National Institute of Design, India. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the United States and Asia, including the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Old San Francisco Mint, Root Division, The First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa, and the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. Mrinalini is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Fellowship (2018-20), the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2019), and the Graduate Fellowship Residency Award at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2017). She has served as a juror for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grants, and has taught a curriculum of drawing, sculpture, and interdisciplinary practice at Pratt Institute, NY and the University of Cincinnati, OH. Mrinalini founded Streetlight in 2016 as a critical spatial research and design laboratory for decolonizing public space. She is presently engaged in a public arts project with the City of Oakland in conjunction with ProArts Gallery and COMMONS, Oakland.

CATHRYN DWYRE-PERRY is an Adjunct Associate Professor, SoA and co-principal with Chris Perry of the experimental design practice pneumastudio. She received an MLA degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Managing Editor of ViaBooks with a volume published by MIT Press entitled Dirt. Pneumastudio’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. Publishers that have featured pneumastudio's work include Routledge, Actar, Prestel, and Wiley-Academy. Dwyre-Perry’s work invests in the exchange between architecture and landscape, with a particular interest in geologic time, ecological aesthetics and climate change. Dwyre-Perry received a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2013 and subsequently was co-chair of the symposium/exhibition at the University of Michigan titled ”Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural.” with a forthcoming book by Actar with a foreword by Catherine Ingraham. Dwyre-Perry received her B.A. from Colgate University, in Geology and Philosophy and did structural geologic mapping fieldwork for the USGS. Dwyre-Perry sits on the board of Basilica Arts, a radical cultural institution based in Hudson, N.Y.

ARIANE LOURIE HARRISON (RA, AIA) is a principal of Harrison Atelier, a registered architect in New York State and an educator. She is the Coordinator of the Masters of Science in Architecture and Urban Design programs at the Graduate School of Architecture, Pratt Institute. She was a critic at the Yale School of Architecture from 2006 to 2017. Her research addresses architecture for multiple species, from her anthology Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory (Routledge, 2013) to “Feral Architecture,” in Aesthetics Equals Politics (MIT Press, 2019). Her firm Harrison Atelier has built pavilions that accommodate multiple species, with projects for birds such as Species Niches (Art OMI, Ghent, 2014) to an analogous habitat for solitary bees, the Pollinators Pavilion at Old Mud Creek Farm, Hudson NY, with an cladding system developed with support by Microsoft’s AI for the Earth program and Ductal® UHPC. She has an AB (summa) from Princeton University, an MArch (design excellence) from Columbia GSAPP and a PhD from New York University.

ANE GONZALEZ LARA is an associate professor of undergraduate architecture at Pratt Insitute’s School of Architecture. Ane is the co-founder of Idyll Studio. Her professional work with Idyll balances social and cultural concerns with extensive formal and material research. She has developed academic research initiatives as part of her studio teaching that have examined the United States-Mexican border and the Korean demilitarized zone, and she has attended conferences on these topics including a roundtable at the 2018’ Venice Biennale. She received her Master equivalent degree from the Escuela Tenica Superior de Arquitectura in Navarra, Spain. She is a registered architect in Texas and Spain. Prior to working at Pratt, she taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of Houston. At Pratt, Ane is the third-year design studio coordinator and she is also involved in several Pratt DEI initiatives such as: Decolonizing the Review; Decolonizing the Curriculum, and COMPOSE. She is also part of Pratt’s Inclusive Ecologies incubator team. Her research interests include pedagogy, and social and climate justice topics as they relate to the built environment. She is the co-editor of the book The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South that will be published in summer 2021. She was recently selected as one of the editors of the Architectural League of New York’s American Roundtable project to feature the voices of border communities and map environmental justice in New Mexico. Her design work has also won multiple international design competitions on interdisciplinary faculty teams.

ELLIOTT MALTBY is a founding partner of thread collective, a multi-disciplinary design studio that explores the seams between building, art, and landscape, and an Adjunct Associate Professor [GCPE] at Pratt Institute. Elliott is interested in how an ecological systems perspective can support both architectural and landscape interventions. Her  work ranges from urban agriculture to defining the urban backstage. A survey of New York City backstage spaces demonstrates a common pairing of productive spontaneous ecologies and aging infrastructure; these are novel landscapes. Rather than seeing them as derelict or underutilized, she is interested in documenting and supporting the stealth success of these spaces. Her Open Space and Green Infrastructure courses develop work with a strong environmental justice framework in collaboration with community organizations. She is an active board member of iLAND, a dance organization that investigates our kinetic understanding of the urban environment. Elliott received her BA in philosophy from Kenyon College and her Master of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley.

HARRIET HARRIS (RIBA, Ph.D., PFHEA) is a qualified British architect and Dean of the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. Her teaching, research and writing focus upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition, and for widening participation in architecture to ensure it remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve, a subject she interrogates in her book, A Gendered Profession. Dean Harriss has won various awards for teaching excellence including a Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Higher Education Academy Internationalisation Award, a Churchill Fellowship, and two Santander awards. 

HUMNA NAVEED is a young architect from Pakistan, and graduate from the MS in Urban Design at Pratt Institute, New York on Fulbright Scholarship. The Graduate program focuses on Climate-resilient strategies for future cities and how urban design can become a tool for understanding climate change and its effects on our built environment. This research is particularly relevant to her home country of Pakistan which lies in the Global South and is experiencing extreme effects of the current climatic shifts. Other than being an architect, she also writes for her poetry page on Instagram and which has grown into a humble community of 900 plus readers. One of her Poems (Women Of Color) was selected in India in 2019 as part of the Global Anthology project, a publication bringing together 100 poets and young artists from around the world.

NANCY SMITH (PhD, MFA) is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at Pratt Institute, where she teaches in the Information Experience Design Program. She has been a practicing designer for over a decade and has a doctorate in Human-Computer Interaction Design, as well as an MA in Media Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing. Nancy’s primary research is focused on understanding the relationship between digital technologies and the environment, which includes work in sustainable design, animal-computer interaction, and urban informatics. Her dissertation explored robotic bees and the implications of integrating artificial intelligence into ecological systems. She also studies food technology, speculative design, and political economy of computing. She is currently working on a book about animals and technology.

MEREDITH TENHOOR (PhD) is an architectural and urban historian, and the coordinator of undergraduate architectural history and theory at Pratt. Her research examines how architecture, urbanism and landscape design participate in the distribution of resources, and how these design practices have produced understandings of the limits and capacities of our bodies. She has written extensively about the relationships between agriculture, architecture, and cultural and territorial change in twentieth-century France, and about the intellectual history of 20th century architectural theory. She is working on new projects about the recent global history of toxic building materials, and about the architect Nicole Sonolet. Her publications include Black Lives Matter (2015), Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics at Fulton Mall (2010), and articles and book chapters on food, architecture, race, media, and biopolitics in Log, French Politics, Culture and Society, Zeitschrift fur Medienwissenschaft, the Journal of Architecture, The Architects' Newspaper, Revista Plot, Pidgin, Pin-up, and Pratt's own Tarp Architecture Manual. Her design projects and performances have been shown at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, common room, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. TenHoor received her a Ph.D. in Architecture from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Art-Semiotics from Brown University. She is editor, a founding board member, and former chair of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, a group devoted to publishing and advancing scholarship in architectural theory and history, and board member of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. In 2018-19 she was a Fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities at Princeton University.

IE Alumni

SWATI PIPARSANIA
Swati Piparsania, AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow, Industrial Design, School of Design. Swati Piparsania is an artist and designer from India. She has worked as a material designer, product manager and developer. She works primarily with object design and creates absurd props for performances. Reoccurring themes in her practice include dysfunctional comedy, restrained movements, and narration. She received her Diploma in Furniture and Spacial Design from Srishti School of Art Design and Technology and her MFA in 3D Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

SIDDHARTH RAJENDRA ASAWA
Sid Asawa is a Graduate student in Information Experience Design at Pratt Institute. He’s a passion-driven individual from India having Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering. He has 2 years of experience working with Pharma firm as UX/UI designer and Digital Creative Agency firms as Visual Communication and Interaction designer in 2018-19. He has also done 5+ projects as a UX consultant at the Center for Digital Experience at Pratt for various non-profits during his graduate program. He helps teams create solutions that meet customer and business needs while considering technical constraints. Currently, he is working at Clignosis (a pharma firm) as an UX/UI Intern making B2B digital products for clients like U.S. FDA.