D CRIT Summer  Intensive

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
 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 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.

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 is a comedian and columnist. He currently pens the Catty Corner column in New York Review of Architecture. He is the co-founder of Talk Hole, a comedy and media brand.

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

He is a former 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 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 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.

Jennifer Kabat’s The Eighth Moon on a 1840s socialist uprising in her town will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2024. Half of a diptych, the second volume Nightshining will come out in 2025. Her work has been supported by numerous grants including a Silvers Foundation Grant and a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. Her essays have appeared in BOMB, Granta, Frieze, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, LARB, New York Review, 4 Columns and the White Review and been anthologized in Best American Essays. She often collaborates with artists and contributes to museum catalogues. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

Bo Kim (she/her) is a User Experience Designer based in New York specializing in consumer and enterprise products in digital health. Her work at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has spanned from overseeing the design strategy of health consumer products to shaping the user experience of the clinical trial digitization process. Previous to her current role, she designed oncology data analytics products at Tempus, a biotech unicorn funded by Google.

She received her design and research training at Carnegie Mellon University, with an interdisciplinary major in Ethics, History, and Public Policy (EHPP) and Art, and an additional major in Human-Computer Interaction. From this background, her interests continue to evolve around digital inclusion, health equity, design justice, and accessibility.

Clara Cayosa is a graphic designer currently based in San Francisco as a cohort for Letterform Archive’s TypeWest program and is expected to graduate in December 2023. She specializes in brand identities, custom typefaces and printed matter.

There is currently a lack of literature on the history and practice of graphic design in the Philippines. Through Tipong Pilipino, an incubator for Filipino type she founded in 2020, Clara intends to research, archive and write about Filipino graphic design while developing and supporting typefaces with local sensibilities.

Gracia is a designer working at the intersection of urbanism, design, and justice. Her practice involves understanding the complexities of urban political ecologies and designing toward a more equitable future. Her interest in cities was shaped by her childhood experiences of growing up in Singapore, a small, rapidly developing Asian nation-state.

She is currently pursuing an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies at The New School. She also collaborates with local organizations such as the NYC Community Land Initiative in advocating and promoting the Community Land Act. Previously, Gracia worked as a designer and researcher at Chemistry, a strategic design consultancy, where she facilitated human-centered design workshops and research activities for business transformation. She graduated as valedictorian from LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA in Design Communication.

Janet is a product designer at heart and a human-centered design advocate. With over a decade of experience, her approach is to first understand the context of people and the systems we affect and change so that we can make better design decisions. Her goal is to create meaningful experiences that have a positive impact on our communities and society.

She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her graphic design work has been included in publications such as Just Design: Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes, CCA Glance Magazine, and Low Tech Print: Contemporary Hand-Made Printing. She is a former freelance visual designer at IDEO, frog, Uber, and Twitter, where she began her career journey as a product designer. Currently, Janet is based in Brooklyn, New York, designing trust and safety experiences for LinkedIn.

Kat de Haan is a design researcher and strategist who has worked in both digital and physical product, across the innovation cycle. Her interest is cyborg anthropology, and in approaching design problems through interrogating relationships between human / non-human entities.

She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. She has worked in both agency and in-house settings, with clients including Whistler Blackcomb, OXO, Braun, Revlon, Milwaukee Tool, Bloomberg and Roche. She is an avid bird watcher.

Khadeine Ali is an Interior Designer with a focus on sustainability, conscious storytelling, and research. Her portfolio includes projects in the hospitality, themed entertainment, and commercial design sectors.

Khadeine's approach to design is rooted in her commitment to equity and fostering authentic connections between users and their environments. She embraces the opportunity to make a meaningful difference by creating spaces rooted in empathy, environmental consciousness, and social responsibility.

She holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts in Interior Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and a Master's in Sustainable Business from the University of Miami. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, giving back to her local community, and finding new coffee shops.

Laura is a freelance digital designer and software developer whose clients include fashion brands, furniture companies, technology startups and arts organizations. She previously worked as an in-house software developer at Artsy, an online art marketplace and platform offering various digital services to art galleries and institutions. She is interested in the social and political contexts surrounding design, visual culture, and digital media. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she first became interested in digital technology and media as creative tools, and a MA in Philosophy from King’s College London, where she wrote her thesis on the distinction between works of “art” and “craft”, specifically works situated in a fine art context that blur this distinction through their employment of handicraft or tradecraft techniques and materials.

Lauren is a multidisciplinary designer and design educator. She currently teaches within the Integrated Design and Creative Writing programs at the University of Baltimore. Alongside teaching, she works with museums across the country to create visitor-centered content interpretation for their exhibits.

She received her BFA in Graphic Design at the University of the Arts and her MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin. Her MFA thesis, Six Principles for Redesigning Museum Interpretation, sought to discover interactive ways museums can provide content to visitors beyond the traditional label and content panel.

In 2020, she co-founded Creative Blocks with her partner, Jacob DeGeal. Creative Blocks is a placemaking and experiential design studio that connects community engagement using tactical art and design.

Michael is managing editor of Communication Arts magazine, a trade journal focused on visual communications. As managing editor, he writes and edits feature interviews with ad agencies, designers, artists working in new media, illustrators, photographers, and type designers; interviews up-and-coming and established artists alike on their practices and philosophy; and works with the winners of Communication Arts’s annual competitions to print captions that provide readers with a window into the artistic process. He holds a BA in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University, a program that ignited his interest in media criticism.

Molly Haig is a graphic designer, artist, and educator currently based in Germany. She designs print, web, and animated projects remotely with Greystudio (NY), and teaches design and typography at the University of Europe in Berlin.

She holds a BA in psychology with a focus in early literacy from Yale, and an MFA in graphic design from Boston University. She previously worked as an in-house designer at Harvard Art Museums.

Her artistic practice combines analog and digital processes including animation, collage, typography, photography, and writing, and her work has been shown in exhibitions across the US and internationally, including recent projects with Colliding Lines (UK) and Radius Collective (Boston).

Sasha Portis is a graphic designer, writer and educator based in New York City. She specializes in interactive and editorial design and has worked with companies like The New York Times, Other Means and Linked by Air. In her writing, she examines sites where the personal and collective intersect: the commute, hitchhiking, cat fostering and Covid dreams. She has contributed to publications including AIGA Eye on Design. Her artist books are included in archives nationwide, and her visual essay on the MTA subway map for The Times was acquired by the Smithsonian Digital Collections.

Sasha holds an MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art, where she was the recipient of the Rebecca Taylor Porter Award for distinction in design. She has taught undergraduate courses at Parsons School of Design, Rutgers University, Pratt Institute and Purchase College.

Scarlett is a playwright, screenwriter, and content creator living in New York City. The daughter of a designer, she is particularly interested in what design trends can tell us about culture and its values. She currently leads content strategy and storytelling for PepsiCo Design + Innovation.

Her writing and projects have been featured in Time, MSNBC, and Alma. She holds a B.F.A. from New York University, where she double majored in Dramatic Writing and Social and Cultural Analysis.