Over the next twelve months, incoming short-term endowed visiting and long-term faculty will bring a breadth of knowledge and excellence to classrooms, studios, and labs at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP). Continuing to support and grow its faculty, the college advances innovations in education and research that push its disciplines forward while reinforcing its mission to prepare the next generation to take on new and ongoing global challenges.
AAP's 2025–26 Named Appointments
Whether inspired to assure that emerging educators have a powerful running start to begin their careers or motivated by a charge to connect students with the best and brightest in the field, AAP's generous alumni community helps support paths to careers in teaching with year-long early career fellowships, as well as through funding regular opportunities to invite well-established leaders in the art and design disciplines to campus for a semester. These voices bring an ever-broadening range of expertise and current topics to AAP.
This semester, designer Emma Silverblatt has been named the inaugural holder of the Judith Kinnard Early Career Design Fellowship in Architecture. Her work explores design activism, public engagement, and participatory production. Mark Anthony Brown Jr., Strauch Early Career Fellow in Art, will share expertise spanning sculpture, drawing, and printmaking rooted in a photographic sensibility.
Architecture Precollege Program Lead Instructor and Judith Kinnard Early Career Design Fellow in Architecture Emma Silverblatt surveys final exhibition models during a Milstein Hall Dome exhibition. Anson Wigner / AAP
In Architecture, Robert Hutchison, a practitioner, researcher, and educator whose interests and practice overlap the fields of architecture, art, and photography, joins the department as the Gensler Visiting Critic. Claire Weisz will serve as the Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design. She is a founding partner of WXY, a New York-based studio globally recognized for its community-centered approach to design across scales.
The Teiger Mentor in the Arts program brings internationally acclaimed artists to Cornell to make ongoing visits to studio and seminar classes and conduct individual critiques with M.F.A. students. Erika Ranee, a painter whose work is built through layering and drawn from daily experiences in both urban environments and the natural world, takes up this position and serves as a Visiting Critic this fall.
Design Tech Open Studio Exhibition 2025 on display at Cornell Tech in New York City. photo / Jesse Winter
AAP's 2025–26 Department Faculty
In addition, the departments of Art, City and Regional Planning, and Design Tech continue to grow their long-term faculty, building on the innovative pedagogy, deep knowledge base, and wide-ranging perspectives that current faculty bring to the college and community. Over the past several years, the university and the college have supported new synergies by encouraging hybrid practices in teaching, research, analysis, and making.
In Art, Carla Liesching, an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design, joins the department as a Lecturer. City and Regional Planning welcomes Madison Lore as Assistant Professor in January 2026. Her research explores the intersection of urban data science, social processes, and sustainable transitions.
Students in the Design and Making Across Disciplines studio review work from the Collective Robotic Construction module taught by Design Tech Innovation Fellow Samuel Leder in 2024. Anson Wigner / AAP
Spanning five colleges at Cornell — AAP, Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell Engineering, Cornell Human Ecology, and Cornell Tech in New York City — the recently founded multicollege Department of Design Tech bridges expertise across disciplines and industries, serving as a generator of new modes, methods, and applications that redefine practice and research spanning design and technology. In the spirit of its wide-ranging vision, faculty often cross departments in dually appointed positions.
Now entering its second year, the department's incoming faculty, who take up positions over the next 12 months, will further cement Design Tech's footing and benefit design, technology, faculty research, and student exploration at Cornell.
Those joining the core Design Tech faculty include:
Marirena Kladeftira, currently a Design Tech Innovation Fellow and Visiting Lecturer who will become Assistant Professor, Design Tech (January 2026), investigates new technologies and media for adaptive, low-impact construction systems that bridge design, fabrication, and human craft.
James Weaver, Associate Professor, Design Tech (appointed jointly with Cornell Engineering's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, August 2025), focuses on investigating structure-function relationships in hierarchically ordered biological composites and the advanced fabrication of their synthetic analogues.
Amira Abdel-Rahman, Assistant Professor, Design Tech (appointed jointly with Cornell Engineering's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, July 2026), comes to Cornell from a position as Head of Technical Product Design at MorphoAI, where she is part of the founding team developing next-generation AI-enabled CAD tools for robotics and manufacturing.
Jose Sanchez, Associate Professor, Design Tech (appointed jointly with Cornell Tech, July 2025), is an architect, game designer, and media artist whose current research designs and interrogates simulation and interactive media as a collaborative, embodied, and situated practice.
Max Kreminski, Assistant Professor, Design Tech (appointed jointly with Cornell Tech, July 2026), is a human-computer interaction researcher with a particular focus on the design of expressive and approachable computational systems to support creative work and play.
