5 Architects & Designers among USA Fellows for 2011

United States Artists has honored the USA Fellows for 2011 at a festive event earlier this week in Santa Monica, CA. Fellowship grants of $50,000 each were awarded to fifty outstanding performing, visual, media, and literary artists or artist teams. USA Fellowships are presented annually in the disciplines Architecture & Design, Crafts & Traditional Arts, Dance, Literature, Media, Music, Theater Arts, and Visual Arts.

Following are the five fellows for 2011 in the Architecture & Design category (click here for the complete list):

Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano

USA Booth Fellow
Brooklyn, NY

Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano both studied at the Universitá di Napoli, where they met, before moving to New York to complete post-graduate studies at Columbia University. In 1993, they founded their architectural firm LOT-EK, which is known for the adaptive reuse and up-cycling of infrastructural and industrial structures, most notably the standard 40-foot shipping container, but also airplane fuselages, oil truck tanks, and cement-mixer drums. Tolla and Lignano both teach at Columbia University.

Elena Manferdini


USA California Community Foundation Fellow
Marina del Rey, CA

Elena Manferdini is an architect, engineer, industrial designer, fashion designer, and teacher. Manferdini applies construction techniques from the engineering field to design clothing, products, and buildings, and patterning has been a particular focus of her research. In 2004, she founded the design firm Atelier Manferdini, which has collaborated with companies such as Moroso, Nike, and Alessi on product designs. She teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles.

J. Morgan Puett

USA Simon Fellow
Beach Lake, PA

The work of conceptual artist J. Morgan Puett encompasses fashion, architecture, public projects, and frequent collaborations with other artists. Puett’s work is imbued with the atmosphere of the rural South, where she grew up. During the 1990s, she ran a series of clothing stores in New York that were art environments as well as venues for her Amish-inspired fashions. In 1997, she moved to rural Pennsylvania to create an artist’s colony named Mildred’s Lane, which operates as a residency for artists and students, a space for landscape and architecture projects, public events, communal dinners, and a studio for research into textile and clothing history.

Jenny E. Sabin

USA Knight Fellow
Philadelphia, PA

Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer, artist, and educator whose work focuses on the intersection between architecture and science. Sabin is the principal of Jenny Sabin Studio (since 2005), an experimental design studio, and is co-founder of the hybrid research and design unit, LabStudio, where architects, scientists, and engineers collaborate to  develop, analyze, and abstract dynamic biological systems to develop new ideas about the ecological design of architecture. She is also an Assistant Professor in the area of Design and Emerging Technologies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University.

Mabel O. Wilson

USA Ford Fellow
New York, NY

Mabel O. Wilson is an architect and scholar whose interdisciplinary practice includes designing buildings, creating speculative installations, and writing. Wilson also runs 
the design firm 6Ten Studio in New York. 
Her research examines the history of African American and black diasporic culture within 
the built environment and expands the 
Euro-American legacy of architectural discourse. Wilson’s book, Progress and Prospects: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, will be published in 2012. She is Associate Professor at Columbia University.