Program Administration
Faculty Committee
Colleen Chiu-Shee
Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning
Colleen Chiu-Shee brings a professional background in architecture and urban design as well as scholarly training in social sciences. She is broadly interested in pathways toward more sustainable urban futures. Her research explores innovative spatial, social, and policy interventions that seek to reform existing practices to foster environmental sustainability and socio-ecological equity. Dr. Chiu-Shee’s doctoral dissertation critically examined eco-cities in China and reflected on how developing countries forged adaptive capacity while grappling with the dual challenges of environmental degradation and rapid urbanization. Building on her dissertation, Dr. Chiu-Shee has employed a comparative and relational approach to explore green city practices in broader international contexts.
Dr. Chiu-Shee’s scholarship seeks to bridge theory and praxis related to city design and development and enable cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues. This commitment involves forging connections among diverse knowledge domains, experiences, and epistemological perspectives across global boundaries. She has developed collaborations between North America and Asia and examined a range of subjects, including housing policy and affordability, community development and collective governance, urban informality and land politics, climate resilience in vulnerable regions, land reclamation and coastal development, master-planned new cities and communities, and digital infrastructure for pandemic management.
Andrew Weiss
Teaching Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture
Collaborating with other designers, builders, volunteers, and artists is the most rewarding aspect of my forty-year career in architecture and landscape architecture. With over twenty years of public service within parks and recreation, I have focused on stewardship and integration of resources—economic and natural—to bring the most long-term value to the built and natural environment. With a firm conviction of balancing theory and practice, I have been a visiting design instructor with both the School of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture for twenty years. My research interests include the repurposing of marginal public space as a practice of design and material decomposition as a process of art.
Melissa Pokorny
Professor and Executive Associate Director, School of Art and Design
A life-long educator, Pokorny is a professor in the Studio Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as the Executive Associate Director of the School of Art and Design. She brings her vast experience with curriculum development and a strategic vision for developing and sustaining programs in the arts and design fields. She has received multiple awards and residencies, including a 2022 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship; the University of Illinois Program For Research in the Humanities Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship; a 2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship; multiple professional project support grants from the Illinois Arts Council; and the Efroymson Arts Fellowship. Residencies include the Skaftfell Arts Center in Seydisfjordur, Iceland; The Ucross Foundation in Ucross, Wyoming; and the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. Pokorny lives in Urbana, IL.
About Professor Pokorny’s research practice, “I make sculptures and installations using lens-based and textile methods along with more traditional 3D materials and processes. My conceptual sources are found in the natural world, in landscape practices, and in the vitality and pull of the material world of non-human things. My process foregrounds collecting—found objects, weird materials, non-traditional images of landscapes, and personal or utilitarian possessions. I combine these elements to fabricate assemblages that raise questions about ways of knowing the world, and how meaning is made through contrived relational systems. The resulting formal engagements and material interactions work to both complicate and reveal the entangled complexities between multiple realities and worlds.”
Cheng Chen
Assistant Professor, Illinois School of Architecture
Daniel Schneider
Past Sustainable Design Faculty Program Administrator
Retired Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning
Daniel Schneider was a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and faculty program coordinator for the Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design. He has been an ecologist and environmental historian whose research focused on the interrelations between natural and human systems in sustainable planning and management. He completed a book on the history of the biological sewage treatment plant that examined the interrelations between the “natural” and “artificial” in this critical infrastructure. He investigated the ecology and management of bed bugs in U.S. cities, examining bed bug infestations as an issue of environmental justice. His teaching covered ecological applications to planning, watershed planning, urban ecology, and environmental history. He is a furniture designer and maker, focusing on using locally and sustainably grown hardwoods.
Affiliated Faculty
- Mohamed Boubekri—indoor environments, health, and sustainable architecture
- Benjamin Bross—urbanism and material culture
- Sara Bartumeus Ferré—architecture and landscape architecture
- Lynne Dearborn—health and equity
- Ralph Hammann—energy and architectural design
- Kevin Hinders—urbanism
- Tait Johnson—history of architecture and materiality
- Sudarshan Krishnan—lightweight and transformable structures
- John C. Stallmeyer—history and theory of architecture
- Mark Taylor—solar design and renewable materials
- Julie Zook—health and wellbeing
- Carlos Aguiar—sustainable manufacturing
- Susan Becker—sustainable fashion design
- Molly Briggs—design theory
- Karin Hodgin Jones—digital art and sustainability
- Deana McDonagh—empathic design
- Mania Taher—human-centered design
- Chiara Vincenzi—sustainable fashion design
- Terri Weissman—history of design
- Jennifer Monson—urban ecologies and movement
- Brian Deal—sustainable planning and design, modeling, and climate
- David L. Hays—landscape theory and history
- Kelley Lemon, PLA, LEED AP, EDAC—vernacular design
- Mary Pat McGuire—water and sustainable landscapes
- Pollyanna Rhee—modern environmentalism
- D. Fairchild Ruggles—landscape history
- Stephen Sears—landscape design
- Michael Silvers—traditional ecological knowledge and materials
- Kim Curtis—sustainable theatre and costume design
- Dustin Allred—urban sustainability
- Lindsay Braun—sustainable transportation
- Colleen Chiu-Shee—sustainable urban futures
- Bumsoo Lee—land use and transportation
- Magdalena Novoa—historic preservation and social justice
- Lou Turner—community organizing