Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive 2026

Jenna Dezinski is a registered architect and interior designer. She has been an Associate at Bjarke Ingels Group in New York City, overseeing design and delivery of projects at varying scales across North America including the Norton Rose Fulbright Tower in Houston, the King Toronto Residences, Beatty Street Pavilion in Vancouver, NASA Olympus, CODEX Residential Collection by ICON, and the Claremont McKenna College Roberts Campus Sports Bowl. She is founder of the jewelry studio Janika, and worked previously with Christoff Finio, Will Bruder, Studio Ma, DeBartolo Architects, and alterstudio where she oversaw the design of distinctive residential projects.

Peter Landon is the founder and principal of LBBA, a Chicago-based architectural practice established in 1987 that is distinguished by its community-based approach. Peter is known for his community-based city planning, development, and design work. He is a champion of “social conscious” and diversity in design and supports neighborhood revitalization efforts across Chicago. His work with the firm has won numerous design awards, including multiple AIA Chicago Distinguished Building Awards and Devine Detail Awards and four Richard H. Driehaus Awards for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. The work has been exhibited and published widely. Peter continually participates in conferences, panel discussions, and lectures with the goal of moving the bar forward and understanding options to ultimately bring better design to our projects.

Clare Lyster is an architect, educator, and writer. A native of Ireland, she is now based in Chicago and is a professor at the UIC School of Architecture, where she explores how metabolic and socio-technical systems territorialize the built environment and the implications of this for design. She is the author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); co-editor of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan (ACTAR, 2017), and States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (ACTAR, 2021). Clare has exhibited locally at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the Chicago History Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and internationally at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016), the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism (2017), the Venice Biennale (2018 + 2021, with ANNEX), the V+A Museum during the London Design Festival (2018), and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2025).

Spencer McNeil is a Chicago-based educator and registered architect whose work explores the interaction and abstraction of reference and context through recombinatory techniques of assemblage and collage. He has worked in Chicago for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Norman Kelley, and BairBalliet. In addition to teaching at UIC, he has taught at Illinois Institute of Technology. McNeil received a Master of Architecture from UIC, where he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal of Merit, and a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Knox College. His work has been published in Wallpaper*, AN Interior, and Dezeen, and conjunction with the writing of Sam Jacob, and exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Ongoing projects include collaboration with Norman Kelley.

Nilay Mistry is a landscape architect and Associate Teaching Professor at the Master in Landscape Architecture + Urbanism (MLA+U) Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology with several years of design practice in North America, Africa, and Asia. Raised in an immigrant family, he works to vivify public spaces in cities as platforms for expression by all participants through built landscapes and academic inquiry. He has been a collaborator on various public art initiatives championing landscape including the Sounding Bronzeville Gathering Space in Chicago’s Burnham Wildlife Corridor and Coiled Serpent in Horner Park. Nilay enjoys spending time with family, usually near trees.