Joshua Ramus is the founding principal of REX, whose mission is to challenge and advance building paradigms and promote the agency of architecture. Recently completed work includes the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York, New York (about which The New York Times raved, “Lower Manhattan could have hardly asked for a more spectacular work of public architecture.”); The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; and 2050 M Street, a premium office building in the District of Columbia that hosts CBS’s Washington Bureau. Projects under design or construction include 9 & 15 The Esplanade, a pair of mixed-use skyscrapers in Perth, Australia; two residential and office towers on the Brooklyn waterfront, as part of the redevelopment of the iconic Domino Sugar Factory site; and two hybrid retail and cultural hubs for Kia Motors in Seoul and Jeju, South Korea; among others.

Joshua has been honored with the Action Maverick Award from the experimental performance company STREB and was the first American recipient of the international Marcus Prize. He has also been credited as one of: the “5 greatest architects under 50” by HuffPost; the world’s most influential young architects by Wallpaper*; the twenty most influential players in design by Fast Company; “The 20 Essential Young Architects” by ICON magazine; and the “Best and Brightest” by Esquire. Joshua’s projects consistently receive the profession’s top accolades, including two AIA National Honor Awards and Time magazine’s Building of the Year.

Craig Barton is the University Architect and a Professor of the Practice in Architecture in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Prior to this appointment, he was Director of The Design School at Arizona State University and Provost at the School of the Art  Institute of Chicago.

Mr. Barton works with senior leadership and members of the Corporation to provide strategic design direction for the campus and oversight on the university’s design guidelines, architect selection, and project design review. He is the author of the anthology, Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race and has contributed to range of anthologies including The City of Memory, Row: Trajectories Through the Shotgun House, and Writing Urbanism. His work has been included in a wide range of exhibitions including an installation at Project Rowhouse in Houston, TX and The Dresser Trunk Project.

Mr. Barton is an alumnus of Brown University and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.  In 1994, Barton was Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is an emeritus Fellow of the Corporation and a trustee of the Graham Foundation.

An artistic director, creative producer and curator of public programs, Avery Willis Hoffman joined Brown University in 2020 as the inaugural Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics. In her recent role as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory in New York, Avery curated and produced innovative and diverse artistic and public programming initiatives, including numerous large- and intimate-scale cultural events, most recently: the multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women (2020), the 12 episode podcast project, Helga: The Armory Conversations (2021), and Carrie Mae Weems: The Land of Broken Dreams Convening (2021).

Prior to the Armory, Avery was a Senior Project Developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects, including the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Avery has also held positions at Focus Features, The Clinton Global Initiative, and TED.

For nearly two decades, her professional career has included multiple projects with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, including Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, and from 2016-2020, the international tour of FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with choreographer Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community.

Avery earned her D.Phil and M.St in Classical Languages and Literature from Balliol College, University of Oxford (as a Marshall Scholar), and earned her B.A. in Classics and English at Stanford University.

An artistic director, creative producer and curator of public programs, Avery Willis Hoffman joined Brown University in 2020 as the inaugural Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics. In her recent role as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory in New York, Avery curated and produced innovative and diverse artistic and public programming initiatives, including numerous large- and intimate-scale cultural events, most recently: the multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women (2020), the 12 episode podcast project, Helga: The Armory Conversations (2021), and Carrie Mae Weems: The Land of Broken Dreams Convening (2021).

Prior to the Armory, Avery was a Senior Project Developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects, including the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Avery has also held positions at Focus Features, The Clinton Global Initiative, and TED.

For nearly two decades, her professional career has included multiple projects with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, including Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, and from 2016-2020, the international tour of FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with choreographer Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community.

Avery earned her D.Phil and M.St in Classical Languages and Literature from Balliol College, University of Oxford (as a Marshall Scholar), and earned her B.A. in Classics and English at Stanford University.

Butch Rovan is a composer, media artist, and performer on the faculty of the Music and Multimedia Composition program at Brown University. From 2013-16 he was chair of Music and from 2016-19 he was the inaugural faculty director of the Brown Arts Initiative.

Prior to Brown, Rovan was a compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, and a faculty member at Florida State University and the University of North Texas, where he directed the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia.

Rovan has received prizes from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, first prize in the Berlin Transmediale International Media Arts Festival, and his work has been performed internationally. His interactive installation "Let Us Imagine a straight line" was featured in the 14th WRO International Media Art Biennale, Poland, and his work “of the survival of images,” for custom GLOBE controller, is included on the Computer Music Journal DVD Sound and Video Anthology. His music appears on the Wergo, EMF, Circumvention, and SEAMUS labels.

Rovan's research includes sensor hardware design and wireless microcontroller systems. His work is featured in The Computer Music Journal and in “Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Drawing from sources across the natural world, and driven by relentless curiosity, Richard Fishman’s sculpture practice spans more than fifty years.

Fishman’s creations are both engaging and beautiful. They draw you in with their allusions to the familiar in nature and beguile using opposing tensions within each piece. The complexity of the surface - and its counterpoint opacity and transparency - all allow him to uncover mysteries and then recover them with mysteries of his own.

Fishman has an enduring interest in combining a considered artistic approach with the operation of random incidents to generate new forms. As a result his finished work  seems to be in a constant state of flux. The new works, mostly colored are built on a core of bronze or styrene and explore new avenues attempting to give shape to color, embedding the color in the sculpture rather than using it simply as a surface coating. The use of color in this way pushes the mutability of the form so that it appears to be in constant motion, almost filmic, flowing.

This way of engaging with color as sculpture carries forward several art historical strands that have skirted this issue but not resolved it. The leap that Fishman is taking is based on his observations of the natural world- lava flows, meteorites, coral growth- where color is intrinsic to and inseparable from the observed form.

Fishman's work is represented in numerous private and public collections including  the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design,  The Jewish Museum NYC, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The DeCordova Museum, and the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. He has had 29 one-person exhibitions, more than 50 group exhibitions and is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Julie Adams Strandberg is a dancer, educator, and scholar. The four primary goals of Strandberg’s research and programs are: to provide dancers with holistic, multi-faceted ways in which to be artists in our culture; to advocate for the inclusion of the arts, and particularly dance, in the education of  EVERY child; and to develop and design materials and programs that provide broad access to dance as an art form to all persons, including pre-professional and professional dancers; students in grades K-university; neurodiverse populations, and the general public. The inclusion of persons with Parkinson’s disease, autism and other cognitive and physical challenges, often denied access to the arts, is consistent with Strandberg’s mission.

Her work is informed by over 50 years experience as a choreographer and performer; as a pioneer in arts education and community engagement; and as an arts administrator and producer.

She is distinguished senior lecturer at Brown University, founding director of dance in the University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, co-founder of Dancing Legacy with her sister Carolyn Adams, co-founder of Artists and Scientist as Partners (ASaP) with Rachel Balaban; and consultant for The Miracle Project®-New England (TMP®-NE) - https://www.themiracleprojectnewengland.org/

She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MS from Bank Street College of Education.  In 2020, she was awarded the Rosenberger Medal by Brown University -- the highest medal given by the faculty for “specially notable or beneficial achievement.”