Mina Morales is a queer Mexican multidisciplinary artist, curator, and organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores themes of liberation, death and rebirth, and divination as a practice for navigating life’s transformations. Mina is dedicated to creating spaces and places where artists, especially queer artists and artists of color, can freely express themselves across mediums and connect with others working toward political and artistic change. She believes community is essential to collaborative, interdisciplinary art-making as both a site of political power and collective action.
Diana is an architect and preservationist with experience in design, urban planning, and heritage management. As former Associate Director of Programs at Van Alen, Diana led Neighborhoods Now in partnership with the Urban Design Forum, and created the framework for Design Sprints.
Before joining Van Alen, Diana worked as an independent heritage consultant for the city of Paramaribo, Suriname as well as the Director of Strategic Management for the Metropolitan Institute of Heritage (IMP) in Quito, Ecuador. At IMP, she contributed to the management of the city’s World Heritage Site; led projects to re-think heritage preservation as a tool for social and economic development; and worked with local and international allies to advance planning and preservation strategies using a community-based approach. She earned her B. Arch in Quito, Ecuador in 2010 and received her Master’s in Historic Preservation from Columbia University in 2015.
New Project is a custom fabrication studio and design services firm specializing in creative build projects. They provide fabrication, design engineering, and installation services, in addition to conceptual design support, technical problem-solving, technology integration, art handling, and project management.
New Project’s team of creative and highly experienced carpenters, metal smiths, artisans, designers, project managers, and support staff merge diverse backgrounds to deliver innovative design solutions. Rooted in robust skillsets built by decades of working with some of the most talented creative professionals in the industry, their team works across typologies and complexities, always striving to enhance the creative vision of our clients.
REX’s founding principal, Joshua leads the firm’s team of diverse professionals and remains intimately involved in all the office’s work. Joshua was the first American recipient of the $100,000 Marcus Prize, the biennial international architecture award conferred by the Marcus Corporation Foundation and the University of Wisconsin, and has been honored by the experimental performance company STREB with its Action Maverick Award. He has also been credited as one of “The 5 Greatest Architects Under 50” by HuffPost; “The World’s Most Influential Young Architects” by Wallpaper*; “The Twenty Most Influential Players in Design” by Fast Company; “The 20 Essential Young Architects” by ICON; “The Best and Brightest” by Esquire; and “The Top 25 Newsmakers” by Engineering News-Record.
Joshua is currently the John Portman Visiting Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AIA New York TORCH Mentor. Committed to supporting architectural education, he has been the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, the Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University, among others. An early member of the TED Advisory Board, Joshua has shared REX’s design methodologies at several TED conferences, and lectures frequently at universities, cultural institutions, and symposiums around the world.
Joshua holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, where he earned the SOM Fellowship and the inaugural Araldo Cossutta Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude with distinction in the major, from Yale University. He is NCARB-certified and a registered architect in states throughout the U.S. and Australia, and in the Netherlands.
REX is an internationally acclaimed architecture and design firm based in New York City, led by Founding Principal Joshua Ramus, FAIA, and Principals Alysen Hiller Fiore, Assoc. AIA, Adam Chizmar, AIA, and Raúl Rodríguez García, PhD, Int’l. Assoc. AIA. Recently completed work includes the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York, New York, about which The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, raved, “Lower Manhattan could have hardly asked for a more spectacular work of public architecture;” The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which, according to Sam Lubell in The New York Times, takes “theater architecture into new territory, pushing the notion of flexibility to its limits; to the point where you wonder if the whole idea of a theater—or any building for that matter—might be changing with it;” and 2050 M Street, a premium office building that hosts CBS’s Washington, DC bureau, which Josephine Minutillo, editor in chief of Architectural Record, declared “sits like a jewel in the city’s Golden Triangle business district.”
The firm’s work under design or construction includes a pair of mixed-use skyscrapers in Perth, Australia; two residential towers on the Brooklyn waterfront as part of the redevelopment of the iconic Domino Sugar Factory site; a hybrid retail and cultural hub for Kia Motors in Seoul, South Korea; office towers in Brisbane, Australia and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and the 4,050 m² (43,600 SF) Necklace Residence on Long Island, New York.
Seminal projects in REX’s growth and continued advancement of architectural typologies include the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas; the Vakko Fashion Center & Power Media Headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Seattle Central Library in the State of Washington. Joshua led the Seattle Central Library—hailed by architecture critic Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture”—while a founding partner of OMA New York (the firm he later rebranded as REX).
Testimony to the firm’s design excellence and innovation, REX and Joshua’s projects have been recognized with top accolades from peer groups, including two American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Awards, a U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology National Honor Award, an American Library Association National Building Award, Time magazine’s Building of the Year, the International Design Awards Building of the Year, two American Council of Engineering Companies’ National Gold Awards, a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Award of Excellence, inclusion in the prestigious Aga Khan Award and Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize contests, listing in Architectural Digest’s AD100, and numerous state AIA, Society of American Registered Architects, ArchDaily, Architect/Progressive Architecture, Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Review/MIPIM, Architizer, and Wallpaper* design awards. Fast Company named the firm one of the World’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Architecture three times and ranked it No. 25 on its 2024 World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies list.
Dione Lee is a Singaporean designer and artist based in New York City. She designs experiences with the team at HUSH, where her work focuses on translating brands and stories into holistic environments, interfaces, and interactions. She has worked across commercial and cross-disciplinary projects spanning print, digital, and experiential media. Her practice is rooted in an interest in behavioral psychology and computer-mediated systems, using data, interaction design, and spatial storytelling to shape how people move, feel, and make decisions within designed environments.
Benjamin Meade is a Senior Design Director at Alloy Development, an architecture and development firm located in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Meade challenges the architecture and real estate disciplines by questioning existing practices and proposing new ways to benefit the social and built environment. Benjamin has been a part of the team since 2012, leading the design effort in the architectural, visual, and marketing departments.
