Gail Kennard is president of Kennard Design Group (KDG), a Los Angeles architectural firm founded in 1957 by her father, the late Robert Kennard, FAIA. In 2023, two of her father’s projects, City of Carson (California) City Hall and the Watts Happening Cultural Center, received preservation planning grants through the Conserving Black Modernism partnership between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Getty Foundation. Her biography about her father’s career will be released in 2025.

James S. Russell, FAIA, is an award-winning independent journalist, with a focus on architecture and how it is intertwined with the growth and development of cities. He has written extensively about architecture as a cultural force, climate change issues, housing, transportation, and urban design for Bloomberg CityLab, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He wrote for nine years about architecture and cities as the architecture critic at Bloomberg News. He is a contributing writer and a former editor at Architectural Record magazine, the chief publication for practicing architects.

Steven Keylon lives in Palm Springs, California, and writes and lectures about Southern California’s cultural landscapes. He is the past president of the California Garden & Landscape History Society, (CGLHS), and has been editor of their journal Eden since 2017.  He is also on the board of DocomomoUS/SoCal and is vice president of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation (PSPF). He is the author of several books: The Design of Herbert W. Burns (2018), The Modern Architecture of Hugh Michael Kaptur (2019), and is the co-author, with Tracy Conrad and Steve Vaught, of Tom O’Donnell: Generous Spirit of Palm Springs (2022).

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is an art historian and curator. She joined Ford Foundation in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. At Ford, she is a Senior Program Officer on the Creativity and Free Expression team, focusing on support for arts and culture organizations across the U.S. At El Museo, she presented visual arts and programming that reflected the history and culture of El Barrio as well as the greater US Latinx and Latin American diaspora.

Meredith Arms Bzdak, an architectural historian, is a Partner in the Princeton, NJ firm Mills + Schnoering Architects, LLC. She has over twenty years of experience in the field of historic preservation, and has produced numerous documents pertaining to historic architecture. As Associate Graduate Faculty at Rutgers University in the Art History Department, she teaches classes on the development of the modern city (specifically New York and Los Angeles), the preservation of the recent past, and modern Italian architecture. 

Rita Cofield joined the Conservation Institute in 2022 to lead the Los Angeles African American Historic Places project. She holds an undergraduate degree in Architecture and Planning from Howard University and a Master of Heritage Conservation degree from the University of Southern California. She is a cultural resource manager and public historian and has stage managed theatrical productions throughout the United States. She currently serves on the board of Howard University’s Southern California Alumni Chapter and is a member of the California Preservation Foundation’s Board of Trustees. She was the inaugural executive director of the Los Angeles-based advocacy organization Friends At Mafundi.

Jingyi Luo was born in China and raised in Beijing. She obtained her Bachelor of Architecture degree from the California College of the Arts in 2019, where she discovered her interest in architectural history and theory. After working as an architectural designer for several years, she decided to pursue a master's degree. Currently, she is a second-year graduate student in the Historic Preservation department at the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in Architectural Conservation.

Tonia Moy is the vice president and director of preservation at FAI. She leads all historic and residential projects. Prior to joining FAI in 2004, she served as architectural branch chief for the State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) and was a trustee at Historic Hawaii Foundation. Her dedication to preservation extends beyond FAI, as she helped establish Docomomo US/Hawaii. Her achievements have been widely recognized within and outside the industry. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Frank Haines Lifetime Achievement for her contribution to Hawaii’s preservation community. 

Theodore Prudon is a leading expert on the preservation of modern architecture and a practicing architect in New York City. Dr. Prudon has worked on the terra cotta restoration of the Woolworth Building, the exterior restoration of the Chrysler Building, and of a 1941 Lescaze townhouse in Manhattan. Dr. Prudon teaches preservation at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. He is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Individual grant for his book “Preservation of Modern Architecture.” He is the founding President of Docomomo US and a board member of Docomomo International.

Amy Van Gessel currently works at MacDonald & Mack Architects in Minneapolis, MN. She has a BS in Interior Design from Adrian College (MI) and both a Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Heritage Conservation & Preservation from the University of Minnesota. She is the current president of Docomomo US MN. Amy is also an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Minnesota – College of Design, teaching architectural drawing and critical thinking. She received the University of MN’s 2018 King Medal for Student Research from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium for her research towards “Modernistic Facelifts: Façade Recladding in Downtown St. Louis During the Post-WWII era.” ​