Current Fellows

Michigan Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis

Torri Smith, M.Arch ’21, will serve as Michigan Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis explores contemporary issues on urbanism and egalitarianism through an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students at Taubman College and College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Smith’s fellowship research, building on her interests at the intersections of environmental justice, urban activism, and design, will explore ways ecological regeneration can address systemic racial inequity.

Michigan Society of Fellows Fellow

Vyta Pivo is a Michigan Society of Fellows fellow in architecture. She is a postdoctoral scholar and assistant professor specializing in architectural and urban history, environmental studies, and the U.S. in global context. Her current project, The Gospel of Concrete: American Infrastructure and Global Power, documents the global ambitions of the U.S. cement and concrete industries along with the environmental and social consequences of their unfettered expansion.

Spatial and Racial Justice Fellow

Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye will serve as the inaugural Spatial and Racial Justice Fellow, beginning in the Winter 2022 term. Understanding that architecture is a cultural product that always negotiates a complex multitude of voices and ideas and a myriad of social, political, and aesthetic concerns, Taubman College launched the Spatial and Racial Justice Fellowship program in 2021 to attract designers, practitioners, spatial activists, and researchers focusing on concerns at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and the built environment. 

Walter B. Sanders Fellow

Leah Wulfman is the Walter B. Sanders Fellow, beginning in the Fall 2021 term. Wulfman is a Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. They have been assembling hybrid, virtual, and physical spaces to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, they are presently working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions, and materials — traversing a variety of themes like Deep Unlearning, Stone Soupercomputers, GamerGirl Bath Water, and our potential interactions with a Jacaranda Tree in full bloom witnessed through Google Earth.

William Muschenheim Fellow

Adam Miller will serve as the Muschenheim Fellow. From 2019 to 2021, Miller was the two-time recipient of the Race & Gender in the Built Environment Fellowship at the University of Texas Austin’s School of Architecture. He is director of Pneu-Stars, a collaborative design group that produces stage designs and installations since 2014, including for Total Trash Productions’ trash rock music festival in Oakland, California. His research investigates the relationship between taste, power, and identity through the lens of the queer body and queer architecture.