Kim Yao, AIA, is Principal of Architecture Research Office (ARO), a New York City firm dedicated to architecture that unites strategy and intelligence with beauty and form. ARO’s diverse body of work has earned the firm over a hundred design awards including the 2020 National AIA Architecture Firm Award, AIA New York State Firm of the Year Award, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award. Kim holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from Columbia College: Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Kim is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and has also taught at the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons, the New School for Design and Barnard College (2001-2011). She is on the Executive Committee and Board for AIA New York and the Center for Architecture as the 2020 President of AIA New York.

Alan Hess is an architect and historian and the author of twenty books on Modern architecture and urbanism in the twentieth century; his subjects include John Lautner, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Ranch House, Googie architecture, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs. He is a Commissioner on the California State Historical Resources Commission, and serves on the boards of Preserve Orange County and Palm Springs Modernism Week. He has been the architecture critic of the San Jose Mercury News, a contributor to The Architect's Newspaper, grant recipient from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Clarence Stein Foundation, and a National Arts Journalism Fellow. Buildings from the Modern era which he has helped to conserve or landmark include CBS Television City (Pereira & Luckman, architect), Bullock’s Pasadena (Wurdeman & Becket, architect), and the oldest remaining McDonald's stand (Stanley Meston, architect.) Awards for his work conserving Modern architecture include the Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Docomomo US Award of Excellence, and the President’s Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy. He is currently writing a history of Modern Architecture in California.

Robert Hruby has shared leadership and design direction with Kevin Campion at Campion Hruby Landscape Architects since 2011. His extensive experience in the profession spans 25 years, working at national and regional firms. As a Senior Associate at Oehme, Van Sweden & Associates, Robert managed the overall design and implementation projects that ranged in type and scale from private residences and mixed-use communities to retail centers and botanic gardens. His award winning residential designs range from large estates to intimate urban gardens. Robert’s projects have been recognized as being in scale and proportion to their surrounding context, elegantly detailed and ecologically grounded. Robert’s interest in private garden design is both practical and scholarly. During graduate school at the University of Massachusetts he was a research assistant for the James Rose Landscape Research Center, where he documented Rose’s groundbreaking residential works. He is a recipient of many residential design awards, including a 2008 National Honor Award in Residential Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects and several from the Maryland and Potomac Chapters of the ASLA. Robert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture from the University of Maryland, and a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Massachusetts. He is a registered landscape architect in the state of Maryland and an active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Emily Rauh Pulitzer is the Chair of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. She grew up in Cincinnati in a 1938 house designed by John Becker and, more recently, oversaw its renovation from a totally dilapidated state.  It won a Docomomo US Award of Excellence for its restoration in 2016. Preceding that undertaking she had commissioned Tadao Ando to design the building which houses the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, whose Board she chairs.  Pulitzer is now working to develop a long block of housing in the Grand Center neighborhood of St. Louis. The architects involved are led by Tatiana Bilbao and include Productora, Macias and Pereda, and MOS. Pulitzer has a B.A. with Honors from Bryn Mawr College and an M.A. from Harvard.  Previously a Curator at the Fogg Art Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum, she has served on their boards, that of MoMA, as well as others.  She received the National Medal of Arts and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.