Our Team

Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez is an architect and associate professor, instructor at the University of Houston, and principal of Tucker De Vazquez Architecture. She has published extensively on the influence of African American culture on the American built environment and her design work has been recognized with multiple design awards. De Vazquez collaborated with artist Rick Lowe on the development of the Project Row Houses campus and was recently awarded the Houston American Institute of Architects (AIA) 25-year campus award for her contributions to the project. Funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, her renovation of a two-story storefront on the Project Row Houses campus received an American Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Award. She is currently working on the Zina Garrison Tennis Academy, which received a 2017 Houston AIA On the Boards Design Award and a collection of essays exploring how low-lying and coastal African American communities are confronting climate change.

WILLIAM D. WILLIAMS is an architect and the current Smith Visiting Professor at Rice University School of Architecture as well as the former Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati College of Design. Williams has published and lectured extensively on the intersection of architecture, collective memory, and racial identity. His design work has been featured in multiple architectural journals and received numerous awards. Williams curated and contributed to the exhibition, ROW: Trajectories through the Shotgun House, which explored the African American roots of the shotgun house typology. This exhibition was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and published as a book by Rice University. Williams also curated and contributed to the Dresser Trunk Project, a traveling exhibition exploring race, segregation, and travel in the Jim Crow Era. This exhibition was presented at numerous symposia and featured in multiple architectural journals.

DIJANA HANDANOVIC is an adjunct faculty member in the University of Houston College of Architecture and Design. She holds a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Social Science-Interior Design degrees from the University of Houston. She is the founding principal of the Houston-based design research practice, Studio Ija, whose projects encompass scales ranging from furniture to urban design. Prior to establishing Studio Ija, Dijana worked at Abel Design Group where she designed commercial and hospitality projects. Dijana’s European heritage inspires a love and fascination with Brutalist architecture in the former Yugoslavia. Her work investigates the role of architecture in the creation and dissolution of Yugoslav identity by exploring the convoluted relationship between monumentality and anti-monumentality.

MARCELLA DEL SIGNORE is an architect, urbanist, educator, scholar, and the principal of X-Topia, a design-research practice that explores the intersection of architecture and urbanism with technology and the public, social, and cultural realm. She is an associate professor and director of the Master of Science in Architecture, Urban and Regional Design program at the New York Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Design. Her research focuses on interscalar design approaches that engage socio-technical systems through computation, prototyping, material and fabricated assemblies, data-driven protocols, and adaptive environments. She is the author of Urban Machines: Public Space in a Digital Culture (LISTLab, 2018; OROEditions, 2020; with G. Riether) and the editor of Data, Matter, Design: Strategies in Computational Design (2020, Routledge; with F. Melendez, N. Diniz). In 2018, she co-edited “Recalibration: On Imprecision and Infidelity” paper and project proceedings (with P. Anzalone and A. J. Wit) published during the 2018 ACADIA Conference where she served as technical cochair. In 2018, she cocurated the Data & Matter exhibition at the European Cultural Centre during the 2018 Architecture Venice Biennale, and was invited to exhibit at the 17th Architecture Venice Biennale in 2021.

TATIANA TEIXEIRA is an architect, urbanist and computational designer. She holds a Master Degree in Architectural Design from The Bartlett Architecture School (UCL), in London, in which she concluded with a distinction and Silver prize, a Master Degree from Instituto Europeo di Design (IED-RJ) in Rio de Janeiro and a professional Degree from PUC-Rio, in Rio de Janeiro. She is currently a Project Designer at X-Topia, a design-research practice that explores the intersection of architecture and urbanism with technology and the public, social and cultural realm. In X-Topia she has worked on the project AÈRIO, for the 17th Architecture Venice Biennale in 2021, was assistant tutor for the Digital Futures workshop, Informed Urban Systems, along with other projects.

Felecia Davis, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design and Computation at Pennsylvania State University and is the director of SOFTLAB. Her work in communicating with computational textiles through architecture has been recognized for connecting art with science and was recently featured by PBS in the Women in Science Profiles series. Davis is currently working on a book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives titled Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles forthcoming by Actar D Press. She participated in MoMA’s group architecture exhibition “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America”.