Welcoming New Faculty Members
This semester, Bi’Anncha Andrews and Jeffrey Halstead join us as new Assistant Professors. Owen Duross is the 2026-2028 Emerging Scholar in Design Fellow.
Bi'Anncha Andrews
Bi'Anncha Andrews joins us as an Assistant Professor. Her research focuses on the displacement and dispossession of BIPOC- residents and small businesses amid urban redevelopment and gentrification. Her scholarly work critically examines how processes of redevelopment disproportionately impact marginalized communities, emphasizing the intersections of race, class, and gender, particularly within low-income public and affordable housing contexts. Drawing on ethnographic research, community-engaged methodologies, and trauma-informed principles, she explores the multifaceted losses experienced by displaced residents—extending beyond the physical loss of housing to encompass disruptions to neighborhood-based social support networks and access to vital social services.
Andrews holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning and Design from the University of Maryland, College Park as well as a Masters of Social Work from The Catholic University of America and a Bachelors in both Criminal Justice and Psychology from Trinity Washington University.
Jeffrey Halstead
Jeffrey Halstead joins us as an Assistant Professor. An architect, artist, and educator, he works across architecture, video projection, installation, and computational image making. His research examines how contemporary vision technologies, including projection, AI-enabled surveillance tech, and neural and point-based scene representations, reshape how architecture is produced, perceived, and remembered. Working across spatial installations, moving images, paintings, printed surfaces, and architectural environments, Halstead treats time as both a medium and a material of architecture. Through projection, scanning, compositing, and computational image construction, he creates feedback loops in which rooms double, surfaces drift, shadows lag, and familiar images return altered by the systems that circulate them. His work is drawn to cultural images that persist beyond their original contexts, accumulating new associations while carrying the residue of earlier desires and imagined futures. Rather than approaching digital media as a vehicle for seamless novelty, his projects attend to repetition, delay, technological failure, and the futures that images continue to promise but never fully deliver.
Halstead holds a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, NY and a Master of Architecture with distinction from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
Owen Duross
Owen Duross joins us as the 2026-2026 Emerging Scholar in Design Fellow. He is an artist and architectural designer from Lexington, Kentucky. He has professional experience in art studios and architecture offices in New York and Los Angeles, including Reiser+Umemoto, Morphosis, Ball-Nogues Studio, and Oyler Wu Collaborative. During his tenure at Oyler Wu, Owen was lead designer and project manager for projects at various scales—from 3d-printed jewelry and high-end furniture, to contemporary exhibitions and installations, as well as architecture and urban planning works in Los Angeles, Taipei, and Saudi Arabia. He also led their digital practices and visualization team and is the editor for their methodological book Puzzling Assemblies. His independent workshop, Stratos, explores emerging methods of applied design, investigating architectural ideas through a synthesis of digital experimentation and technical production. This research integrates 3D modeling and computation with fabrication and construction, focused on developing projects that embrace intricate tectonics and complex geometries to shape building mediums with formal invention.
Duross holds both a B.Arch and M.Arch from the University of Kentucky's College of Design.