2024-25

• Heather Davis, member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
• Tyanna Buie, artist who explores her relationship to image, fragmentation, appropriation, identity and the contemporary condition through social media and commentary.
• Petra Kuppers, disability culture activist, writer, dance video maker and community performance artist.
• Julie Ezelle-Patton, poet, performer, artist and author.

2023-24

• Jordan Cantor, artist who explores the intersections of painting and photography in conversation with Tyler alum Charlotte G. Chin Greene (MFA ’21) and Philip Glahn, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies.
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author and disability justice activist in conversation with Tyler alum Zoe Zahava Steinberg (BFA Printmaking ‘22).
• Ilana Savdie, artist who creates uncanny abstractions that propose ways to resist, transgress and dismantle power structure.
• Sebastian Duncan-Portuondo, stained glass artist in conversation with Alpesh Patel, Associate Professor of Art History.

• 2024 – Ximena Valle Diaz is the founding principal of FIFTEEN Architecture + Design, a Philadelphia-based, design-focused architecture practice driven by the desire to affect positive change.

• 2023 – DIGSAU Architects is an award-winning firm focused on mission-driven clients such as ReBuild Philadelphia and education, art, exploration and physical wellness non-profits. 

• 2023 – Inga Saffron is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic.

• 2024 – Principal Shawn Evans and Senior Designer Garron Yepa of MASS Design Group focus on community-based design and cultural heritage preservation, especially in indigenous communities. 

• 2022 - Olalekan Jeyifous is an award-winning Nigerian-born visual artist trained in architecture, whose work considers the relationships between architecture, community and the environment and embodies Afrofuturist reimaginings of the world.  

• 2021 - Sharon Johnston, design critic in Architecture, FAIA, in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is a partner of Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles. Her firm has been the recipient of more than 30 major awards and has worked on projects worldwide.

• 2025 - Gerald Brown is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia who uses ceramic objects, found objects, sound and wall signage. She a co-founder of the Clay Siblings Project, which provides free ceramic workshops around the country. 

• 2023 – Marcellus Armstrong is a Philadelphia artist, media programmer and educator interested in archives of Blackness, queerness and their relationship to materials. He is the director of programs and content at the Forman Arts Initiative.

• 2025 - Ronny Quevedo, an Ecuadorian-born artist and New York resident, whose practice includes installation, drawings and prints through which he explores themes of identity, revisioning pre- and post-colonial symbols and reviving indigenous abstraction to create connections between the past and present. 

• 2024 - Cynthia Daignault is painter, writer, curator and musician who lives in Brooklyn. The New Yorker has called her “a poet of a painter.” 

• 2023 - Angela Dufresne is a painter, who uses space to create a cinema-like sense of motion, reimaging iconic film scenes with lesbian imagery to upend ideas about women and queerness.  

• 2022 - Sarah Faux uses abstraction and color to explore traditional figure-drawing techniques, asking viewers to reconsider how they view the human body.

• 2023 – Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist and writer whose work analyzes the personal and political impact of image saturation in our current world. 

• 2022 – Jennie C. Jones’ art is not bound by one particular medium. Many of her works resemble paintings and sculptures, but she dwells in the realm of lived experience, creating art that incorporates space, sound and environments, drawing upon and reinterpreting Black avant-garde strategies. 

• 2020 – Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist whose work addresses ecological destruction, human rights and cultural homogenization. Her multidimensional works begin as poems, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance. 

•  2019 – Nick Cave is best known for his Soundsuits, wearable Sculptures based on the scale of his body initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals identity, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. 

• 2018 – Rick Lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, five city blocks housing 39 structures in Houston’s Ninth Ward, one of the oldest African American neighborhoods. Project Row Houses serves as a home base to community-enriching initiatives, art programs and neighborhood development activities. 

• 2017 – LaToya Ruby Frazier’s poignant work uses photography, text and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender and race. 

• 2016-17 – Judy Pfaff’s dazzling installations immerse the viewer in exuberant environments made of found materials.

• 2025 – Dr. Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University) and Dr. Emily Neumeier (Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University) spoke on "Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century."  

• 2023 – Dr. Andrea Achi (Metropolitan Museum of Art) gave a lecture entitled, “Byzantium and Africa (4th—15th centuries CE).”  

• 2021 – Dr. Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) spoke on “The Ethiopian Eunuch: Gender and Racialization in Byzantium.”  

• 2018 – Dr. Michael W. Cothren (Swarthmore College) gave the talk, “Surveying Islamic and Gothic Art and Architecture: Reflections of a Textbook Author.”

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• 2024 – Nisha Bansil is a glass artist working in New York and the Catskills where she creates commissioned and personal works that deconstruct and reassemble organic forms. She works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a conservation mount maker and preparator.  

• 2023 – Earth Aengel is an international artist and curator that uses glass, metal and body wax to create from their own non-binary, gender-fluid trans experience, navigating fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric capitalism.  

• 2021 - Layo Bright is a Nigerian-born sculptor whose works explore themes of migration, inheritance, legacy and identity through hybrid portraits, textiles and mixed media.  

• 2021 - Sebastian Duncan-Portuondo explores ideas of home, exile and belonging. In site-specific and client-based projects, he uses mosaics, stained glass and colored light to create vibrant environments that reinforce public identities. 

• 2019 - Jiyong Lee is a Korean-born artist who uses a special glass technique called “cold working” to create his unusual, segmented sculptures inspired by the growth of cells. He is a professor of art and head of the glass program at Southern Illinois University.

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• 2025 – Andrea Pippens is a visual storyteller who works across various forms of media for clients such as the Malala Fund, Instagram, Apple, Sephora, Five Below, national Geographic and the USPS national Kwanzaa stamp. She is the illustrator of the Young, Gifted and Black book series. 

• 2025 – Mary Kate McDevitt (BFA ’08, Graphic and Interactive Design, Illustration) is a Vermont-based illustrator and lettering artist, who has created hand-lettering and illustrations for Target, Chronicle Books, Smucker’s and Macy’s. She is the author of the Hand-Lettering Ledger, Illustration Workshop and Every Day is Epic.  

• 2024 – Chuck Styles, a Philadelphia-based visual artist and creative director, has worked in partnerships with Vice President Kamala Harris, HBO, Marvel, the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago White Sox among many others. 

• 2024 – Steve Perry of Bailey Brand Consulting gave a talk entitled, “The Art of the Artificial: Agency Insights on the Use of AI,” sharing his firm’s approach to addressing AI creatively, how it impacts creative work and triggered lawsuits.