D-Crit People

Core Faculty

• Alicia Ajayi

  Architectural designer and researcher

  Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an architectural designer, researcher, writer, and (still trying to figure it out) based in NYC. After receiving a dual masters in architecture and social work from Washington University in St. Louis, Alicia worked as an associate designer at MASS Design Group. There she contributed to the Equal Justice Initiatives Soil Collection exhibition and the ground-breaking Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a site dedicated to the racial terror and lynching throughout US history.

  She graduated from the SVA MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism program in 2020. At SVA, she refined her research practice to be rooted in historical research and cultural theory applications. Ajayi is currently documenting and researching Brooklyn, IL, the first Black American town to be incorporated by 1829. Situated along the Mason-Dixon line, Brooklyn’s past offers a rich history of the external ideologies and internal motivations that created radical Black spatial conditions. The study of Brooklyn and other antebellum Black settlements offer a critical understanding of Black place-making in American history. The research is supported by the School of Visual Arts Alumni Association (2019), the New York State Art Council on the Arts (2019), and the Architectural League’s Deborah J. Norden Travel Grant (2020). Ajayi’s article “We Call It Freedom Village: Brooklyn, Illinois’ Radical Tactics of Black Place-making” can be read here.

  Ajayi’s practice incorporates multiple writing forms from scholarly to commentary to experimental. Her work is featured in The New York Architecture in Review, PIN-UP Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, The Architectural Review, Dear Friend, and The Funambulist. Ajayi serves on the advisory board of Oculus Magazine. She is the show producer for the upcoming podcast Curious Story Lab, an interview platform hosted by influential graphic designer Michele Washington, spotlighting designers of color. Ajayi is also the project manager at BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, a group of design professionals dedicated to protect and create Black spaces.

  She co-teaches Approaches to Design History, Part II with Jon Key in the Fall Semester.

  

• Margaret Arbanas

  Architect and author

  An architect and an author, Margaret Arbanas has worked on projects ranging from books to exhibitions to buildings to cities. Educated at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Arbanas joined Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and New York in 2003, where she was responsible for a number of projects in Europe, US and China. Highlights from her time at OMA include visual identity design for the European Union, content development for the exhibition The Image of Europe, timeline design for OMA’s retrospective exhibition and publication Content, and design of Cornell University’s new school of architecture. She returned to Harvard in 2009 to co-lead Koolhaas’ master thesis cohort in 2008.

  In 2009 Arbanas started her own practice, collaborating with numerous cultural institutions such as Guggenheim Museum , Harvard University, and Pentagram. Her work has been featured in the Venice Biennale of Architecture and various publications.

  Arbanas was awarded grants from the Graham Foundation and American Institute of Architects to relocate to Cuba and research the 1959 revolution’s impact on architecture and culture. She is also the recipient of the Balokovic Scholarship from Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

  

• Molly Heintz

  MA Design Research Program Chair; editor in chief Oculus magazine

  Molly Fulghum Heintz is the Program Chair of the SVA MA Design Research program and the editor in chief of Oculus, the quarterly magazine of the American Institute of Architects, New York. She is a co-founder of the editorial consultancy Superscript and has served as the firm’s managing director since 2012. With Superscript, she has collaborated on strategy, research, and writing projects for a range of design organizations and institutions, including Pentagram, the Museum of Modern Art, and Rockwell Group, in addition to producing conversation series for the Museum of Arts and Design, the Venice Architectural Biennale, and the Oslo Architecture Triennial. Prior to Superscript, Heintz led communications departments at the architecture firms Gensler and Rockwell Group and was a fellow at the Philip Johnson Glass House, where she helped launch the interactive site “Glass House Conversations.” She holds BAs in Classics and Archaeology from Duke University, an MFA in Design Criticism from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, where her PhD research focuses on narratives attached to design objects. Heintz has edited multiple books and magazines, and is a contributor to Design Observer, Fast Company magazine and The Architect’s Newspaper. Her writing has also appeared in The Art Newspaper, AIGA Voice, and Studies in the Decorative Arts, among other publications.

  Her current research focuses on design and disinformation, and she presented a related paper, “The Role of Design in the Creation of Fake News,” at the 2018 College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles.

  

• Steven Heller

  Co-chair MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur

  Steven Heller is the co-chair of the SVA MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program and the SVA Masters Workshop in Rome. He writes the Visuals column for The New York Times Book Review, a weekly column for The Atlantic online and The Daily Heller / Imprint online. He has written more than 160 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including The Design Entrepreneur (with Lita Talarico), Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, Citizen Designer, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits (with Louise Fili), The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State and 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. He is a contributing editor for Print, Baseline, Design Observer, and Eye. Heller is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the School of Visual Arts’ Masters Series Award and the 2011 National Design Award for “Design Mind.”

  @thedailyheller

  

• Karrie Jacobs

  Professional observer of the manmade landscape

  Karrie Jacobs is a professional observer of the manmade landscape. Her recent writing has appeared in Curbed, the New York Times, and the MIT Technology Review. She has been a columnist for Metropolis and a contributing editor for Travel + Leisure, Architect, House + Garden and Metropolitan Home. Jacobs was also the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell, the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors. She is the author of The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (Viking, 2006).

  

• Jennifer Kabat

  Writer and editor

  Jennifer Kabat’s essays have been included in Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, BOMB, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books, and the White Review. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. She often collaborates with artists, most recently Marlene McCarty and Kate Newby and her writing has been included in exhibitions at the Poor Farm (Waupaca, Wi); Arnolfini (Bristol UK) and Index (Stockholm, Sweden). An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York, teaches at the New School and SVA, and serves on her volunteer fire department. She was recently awarded a Silvers Foundation Grant, and is currently working on a memoir on time and socialist uprisings.

  

• Jon Key

  Artist and designer

  Jon(athan) Key is an artist, designer, and writer originally from Seale, Alabama. After receiving his BFA from RISD, Jon began his design career at Grey Advertising in NYC before moving on to work with HBO, Nickelodeon, and The Public Theater. Now he is co-founder of the Brooklyn–based design studio Morcos Key with Wael Morcos. As an educator, Jon has taught at MICA, Parsons, and currently teaches at Cooper Union and SVA. Jon is also a Co-Founder and Design Director of Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color. Jon was selected for Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style list for 2020 and was the Frank Staton Chair in Graphic Design at Cooper Union 2018-2019. His work has been featured in Jeffery Deitch Gallery NYC, the Armory Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

  He holds an MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism from SVA (Class of 2021). He co-teaches Approaches to Design History, Part II with Alicia Ajayi in the Fall Semester.

  @jonkey13

  

• Adam Harrison Levy

  Writer, documentary filmmaker and producer

  Adam Harrison Levy
 is a writer and freelance documentary film producer and director. He specializes in the art of the interview. For the BBC he has conducted interviews with a wide range of actors, writers, musicians and film-makers including Meryl Streep, Philip Glass, and Paul Auster. He was the U.S. producer for Selling the Sixties, a cultural history of advertising in New York in the early 1960s and Close Up, about the artist Chuck Close. His directing credits for the BBC include Step Right Up and War Machine. He has produced and directed interviews for films such as Lou Reed Remembered, The Kennedys, and D-Day to Berlin. He is a contributing writer for The Design Observer and wrote the catalog essay for Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945, an exhibition at the International Center for Photography and Saul Leiter: Retrospective at the Deichtohallen, Hamburg. His journalism has appeared in The Huffington Post and The Guardian Weekend Magazine. In 2012 and 2013 he curated the BBC/SVA documentary film festival and in 2012 he was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University. In 2013 and 2104 he is a visiting assistant professor in the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University.

  

• Pierre Alexandre de Looz

  Arts writer, architect, and media consultant

  Pierre Alexandre de Looz is a New York-based arts writer, architect, and media consultant. He has reported on art, design and fashion for The New York Times Style Magazine T, Fantastic Man, V magazine, Art in America, Surface, and Tokion, among others. He is New York contributing editor for award winning 032c magazine, for which he has profiled leading fashion industry figures like photographer Steven Meisel, designer Nicolas Ghesquière, and most recently designer Raf Simons. In 2006 he co-founded design and culture semiannual PIN-UP magazine, and serves as the magazine’s editor-at-large. He is a graduate of Yale University with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and earned a Master’s in Architecture from Columbia University in 2004. Following apprenticeships with Robert AM Stern and Zaha Hadid, his design work currently focuses on residential and exhibition design.

  

• Leital Molad

  SVP of Content Development at Pushkin Industries

  Leital Molad is the head of content development at Pushkin Industries, the audio company that's home to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, Broken Record with Rick Rubin, The Happiness Lab, Against the Rules with Michael Lewis, and many more chart-topping podcasts and audiobooks. Previously, she was the executive producer of podcasts at First Look Media (Topic Studios & The Intercept). Before that, Molad spent more than a decade producing radio and podcasts at WNYC, including the Peabody Award-winning arts and culture show Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen. She has an MA in journalism from NYU.

  

• Anne Elizabeth Moore

  Cultural critic and author

  Anne Elizabeth Moore is a cultural critic and the author of Gentrifier: A Memoir (2021), an NPR best book, Unmarketable (2007), the Eisner Award-winning Sweet Little Cunt (2018), and other titles. She was the founding editor of the Best American Comics, and is the former editor of the Chicago Reader and Punk Planet. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation and the Fulbright Commission. She previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the Mackey Chair of Creative Writing at Beloit College. She lives in New York with her cat, Captain America. The Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017 Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes is being expanded for the pandemic and will be out from Feminist Press in 2023.

  

• Eric Schwartau

  Director of Operations, MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism

  Eric is a comedian and columnist. He is one-half of Talk Hole, a comedy brand and column for Gawker and formerly Interview Magazine. Talk Hole's work has been featured in Dazed magazine, GQ Australia, Mic, The New York Times, Time Out New York, Interview Magazine, The Creative Independent, and Art in America. His writing can be found in publications including New York Review of Architecture, and Gawker, Editorial Magazine, and Ssense Magazine.

  At D-Crit, Eric fulfills numerous roles in the department as Graduate Advisor, Applied Media and Thesis Development Workshop instructor, and Program Coordinator of the Design Writing & Research Summer Intensive.

  He is a former Book Editor at Taschen, where he worked on art & photography titles as well as series with The New York Times and National Geographic. He holds a B.A. in Urban Studies with Honors from Vassar College.

  

• Rob Walker

  Technology and culture columnist, Yahoo News

  Rob Walker is a technology and culture columnist for Yahoo News and a blogger at Design Observer, and until 2013 wrote The New York Times Magazine’s Consumed column. He is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House, 2008), Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press, 2005) and the co-editor with Joshua Glenn of Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things (Fantagraphics, 2012). Walker is the co-founder, with Ellen Susan and G.K. Darby, of The Hypothetical Development Organization, and founding collaborator of the Unconsumption project, and is often called on as an expert commentator on the subject of material culture and branding, notably in the documentary Objectified.

  

Guest Faculty & Critics

Vanessa Rosales

Writer and critic

Fall 2022 Critic-in-residence Vanessa Rosales is a Colombian-based writer and critic. Her second book Uncomfortable Woman was published in 2021 by Penguin Random House. She has a podcast that combines cultural criticism, the history and theory of style, women's history and literature as well as the multiplicity of the feminist perspective. As an essayist and public intellectual she has specialized in understanding everything that is uncomfortable about the ways in which the feminine has been constructed in historical, social and cultural terms.

She writes a weekly column for one of the major local newspapers El Espectador. She created and led the first Diploma in Critical Studies of Fashion for the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in the country.

She teaches critical fashion studies, women's literature and feminist theory in hybrid, independent, formats. Rosales has an MFA in Fashion Studies from Parsons The New School for Design, studied a masters in journalism and majored in history. Her work has been featured in Vestoj, The Business of Fashion, CNN Style, Vogue Latin America, BBC Mundo, and several Latin and Colombian publications. She is now working on her third book.

Craig Taylor

Author and editor

Craig Taylor is the author of New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time and Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It. His two previous books, Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, were adapted for the stage. He is the editor of the literary magazine Five Dials.

Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, and curator

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator.

She was co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, curator of Soft Schindler at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and co-curator of the 2020-2021 Exhibit Columbus entitled New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City?

She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Architect. She is an opinion columnist for Dezeen and former West Coast Editor of The Architects Newspaper. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture.

Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses, Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, and Tiny Houses in the City. In 1997, Zeiger founded loud paper, an influential zine and digital publication dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.

She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been shown at the Art Institute Chicago, 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. She co-curated Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen.

She is visiting faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design. She was co-president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and taught at the School of Visual Art, Art Center, Parsons New School of Design, and the California College of the Arts (CCA).

She holds a Master of Architecture degree from SCI-Arc and a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University.