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63 FIFTH AVENUE,
NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

Alyssa Velazquez and Theodossios Issaias

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Alyssa Velazquez and Theodossios Issaias

  • GIDEST 63 5th Avenue New York, NY, 10003 United States (map)

After school

Alyssa Velazquez is a cultural historian, playwright, actress, and writer of gender, performance, and material culture.

Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Material Intelligence, The Tower, Scraps Literary Journal, The Establishment, AutoStraddle, GRLSQUASH, The Fashion Studies Journal, Women’s History Magazine, Juggad: A Material Religions Project, and the Votive Project. Past residencies include Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices 2024, City Books Writer-in-Residence, and as a Freshworks Artist at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a proud member of Dramatists Guild of America.

She holds an MFA from the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, and a BA from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. 

Theodossios Issaias is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of human rights, conflict and the provision of shelter. This interest led to his Ph.D. dissertation Architectures of the Humanitarian Front (2021, Yale University), which examined a period around WWI when conflict, displacement and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration of humanitarian operations – their spatial organization and ethical imperatives.

Theo is co-founder of FATURA Collaborative, a research and design practice established in 2009. FATURA practices in a non-hierarchical and collaborative way with geographers, law experts, political scientists, nonprofit housing advocacy groups and activists to conduct research and develop projects that expand new problematics about ecology and the domestic. They have developed projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performances to urban design. Their work has been presented in exhibitions and museums such as the Venice Biennale, Manifesta, Acropolis Museum and Benaki Museum, among others.

Theo studied architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT.

Earlier Event: April 3
Manjari Mahajan