D CRIT Summer  Intensive

Instructors

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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).

  

• 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.

  

2022 Participants