Faculty + Mentors
Meet the faculty and mentors of the MFA in Collaborative Design.
Peter Schoonmaker
Founding Chair
pschoonmaker@pnca.edu
PhD 1992 Harvard University (Organismic & Evolutionary Biology)
BA 1981 Colorado College (Biology)
Peter Schoonmaker is Founding Chair of the MFA in Collaborative Design at PNCA, the first program in the United States to apply collaborative design thinking to real-world wicked problems. He comes to PNCA with a background in non-profit entrepreneurship, working with conservation organizations, community groups, government agencies, and natural resource businesses to design mutually beneficial forest, fisheries and watershed partnerships in the Pacific Northwest.
Peter is founding president of Illahee, a non-profit organization that provides a forum for environmental innovators to exchange ideas and increase the rigor of public discourse around environmental/social/economic systems. He was also board president of Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, facilitating a process that permanently protected 35,000 acres of ancient forest.
Peter has held positions at University of Massachusetts, Oregon State University, Willamette University, Portland State University and Linfield College.
Howard Silverman
Instructor
hsilverman@pnca.edu
BS 1984 University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School (Decision Sciences: Management of Information Systems)
Howard Silverman has worked at Ecotrust since 1999, currently as senior writer and analyst, and has guided the development of Ecotrust communications and publications in a wide variety of media. His areas of focus include spatial planning, life cycle assessment, ecosystem services and food systems analysis. Projects include the SectionZ newspaper campaign, Vivid Picture Project, People and Place weblog and Resilience Regions convening. He provides strategic support in creative direction, messaging, editing, writing, and public engagement.
Wayne Bund
Assistant Professor
wbund@pnca.edu
MFA 2010 Pacific Northwest College of Art (Visual Studies)
MST 2006 Pace University (Teaching)
BA 2004 University of Oregon (Theater/Fine Arts)
Wayne Bund is an interdisciplinary artist whose work resides within the act of performance. He uses photographs, videos, installation, and performance to explore notions of persona and authenticity. He casts his body in a changing array of characters, inhabiting each persona through action. Bund uses mythology as the central context of his pieces, dissecting and appropriating stories from the collective unconscious to re-imagine historical narratives and comment on contemporary culture.
Bund was born in Portland and raised on a farm in Boring, Oregon. He comes from a background in theater, and worked as a kindergarten teacher for two years through Teach For America and as a PE teacher at Oregon Episcopal School. He has served as an Assistant Professor at PNCA for two years. Bund has performed at the Ludlow Festival in the U.K. and in Portland with PICA’s TBA:09 and TBA:11 festivals.
Kristin Rogers Brown
Assistant Professor
krogersbrown@pnca.edu
Grad Cert 1999 Denver Publishing Institute (Book Publishing)
BA 1994 Kenyon College (Studio Art, English)
Kristin Rogers Brown is an art director and graphic designer who has worked in a wide variety of environments, from small studio to corporate in-house design to publishing. She joined Bitch Media as art director in March, 2010. Though her first love in design is print, she loves finding the right media for the message, and believes in keeping a balance of intelligence, function, and fun in all the details of her work, whether it’s brand development, packaging, identity, or web design. In addition to designing Bitch, Rogers Brown is a freelance art director, and served on the board of AIGA Portland from 2004 to 2011, finishing her term as vice president. She has worked with sustainable design initiatives for a variety of clients (including a long-time stint as creative director for The Bear Deluxe magazine), and has been instrumental in working with AIGA Portland’s sustainability team (established in 2008) and Worldstudio’s Urban Forest Project. Visit her blog to see inspiration for her work and designs in process.
Nick Barham
Mentor
Nick started his advertising career in London in the mid- 90s, working at BBH and then Karmarama, on brands like Levi’s, IKEA and Amnesty International. After ten years he decided he needed a change of scenery and moved to Shanghai to join Wieden+Kennedy as Planning Director.
During his time in China, Nick touched every piece of the business, eventually becoming Executive Creative Director, a first for a W+K planner. In December 2010, Nick moved to Portland as Global Director of W+K Tomorrow. Working across the network to help W+K innovate beyond its core advertising business, he is currently exploring how emerging tech, sustainability,open data, and a bunch of stuff he doesn’t know about yet are changing how a communications company could behave and what it makes.
Bonnie Bruce
Mentor
Bonnie Bruce has 30 years of experience in commercial interior design and architecture. She has been a recognized leader in the “green building” movement since 2000 and was the first interior design in Oregon to become a LEED accredited professional. In 2010 she segued into landscape design and is currently applying her passion for the environment to the other side of the threshold as owner of her own firm, Celilo Gardens. She taught previously at Marylhurst University, published various articles and has been a speaker at regional and national venues.
Molly Danielsson
Mentor
BA 2007 Oberlin College (Environmental Studies)
Molly Danielsson is a professional designer and illustrator seeking to help others understand the science of the world around them in order to make better decisions. Molly and Mathew co-founded the Cloacina Project two years ago and have created a series of educational publications, workshops and services in order to demonstrate the economic feasibility of sustainable sanitation through a replicable business model. Molly will be lending her artistic hand to ReCode Oregon to create a multi-media educational campaign for regulators and the public on ecological sanitation with funding from the Bullitt Foundation. Molly uses her interdisciplinary training to lead research and development initiatives for IceStone, a triple bottom line countertop manufacturer based in New York City, developing countertops from 30% cement and 70% recycled glass. Partner, Biluna Birotunda Design.
Don Harker
Mentor
MS University of Notre Dame (Biology)
BS Austin Peah State University (Biology)
Don Harker has 30 years of experience in the private, government and nonprofit sectors and has a national reputation for innovative leadership. He worked in Kentucky state government for more than 10 years as director of the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, director of the Kentucky Division of Water and director of the Kentucky Division of Waste Management. He initiated the Kentucky Water Watch program which is now 20 years old (www.state.ky.us/nrepc/water/wwhomepg.htm). Don co-founded and served as board treasurer of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust and is active with local groups in Oregon working on forest issues. He consults with Sustainable Northwest and communities throughout the US on sustainable development. He has coauthored several books, including the Landscape Restoration Handbook and Where We Live: A Citizen’s Guide to Conducting a Community Environmental Inventory.
Mike Houck
Mentor
MS 1972 Portland State University (Biology)
BS 1969 Iowa State University (Zoology)
Mike Houck has been a leader at the local- regional- national and international levels in urban park and greenspace issues since his founding the Urban Naturalist Program at the Audubon Society of Portland in 1980. Since that time he has worked on urban parks- trails- greenspaces and natural resources in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. He speaks locally- nationally and internationally on issues related to urban natural resources and sustainable development. He helped found the Coalition for a Livable Future in 1994 to better integrate social and environmental issues into the region’s growth management planning process. The CLF consists of over 70 nonprofit organizations- individuals and businesses from the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region working to build an equitable and sustainable metropolitan region.
Mike directs the Urban Greenspaces Institute out of the Center for Spatial Analysis and Research at Portland State University’s Geography Department where he is an adjunct instructor. Mike serves on the national steering committee of the Ecological Cities Project of Amherst- MA and on several local and regional urban watershed- park and greenspace advisory committees in the Portland metropolitan region.
He is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission and is on the board of directors of The Intertwine Alliance.
Mathew Lippincott
Mentor
BA 2006 Oberlin College (Philosophy)
Mathew Lippincott is a professional designer and aeronautical artist looking to expand into the medium of outer space. His current work includes future toilet systems with the Cloacina Project and civic science with the Public Laboratory. He has exhibited internationally through the Centquatre in Paris, Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, and La Fabrica in Madrid, as well as with Grand Detour in Portland, Oregon.
Jamie Ostrov
Mentor
BS Georgia Tech (Industrial Design)
Jamie is Wieden+Kennedy’s Sustainability Strategist helping develop sustainable platforms internally and across clients, most recently with the Nike Better World launch. Previously with Saatchi & Saatchi S, she worked with the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, designing and facilitating personal sustainability campaigns that engaged workforces across the country.
Jamie graduated summa cum laude with a B.S in Industrial Design from Georgia Tech, where she was also an All-ACC high jumper and sprinter. In her spare time she keeps a garden with 3 fat chickens, and loves stop-motion animation, farmer’s markets, DIY crafts, and hiking-biking-canoeing-exploring scenic & remote places.
Paul Platosh
Mentor
MA 2005 Reed College (Liberal Studies, Concentration in Studio Art)
BA 1995 Carnegie Mellon University (Graphic Communications Management)
BA 1995 Carnegie Mellon University (Creative Writing)
Paul Platosh is the Chair of the Communication Design Department at PNCA. He has been teaching at the college level since 1999. Platosh started his career on the East Coast in the book publishing industry doing covers and layouts, as well as other forms of print design. He migrated as a staff designer and freelancer working primarily in print, finally ending up at Thompson Publishing. Currently, in addition to teaching, he does freelance digital design. Puddletown Press, Platosh’s own business, focuses on antique letterpress printing. His Master’s degree thesis work concentrated on sustainable package design.
Mayank Sharma
Mentor
Mayank Sharma is a senior level cross-disciplinary professional, with a strong technical background and rich expertise in establishing requirements for new digital product categories. He is a creative problem solver with an ability to generate product and business ideas with demonstrated success to define successful high volume, hi-tech products. Mayank is excited by the possibilities of incorporating human considerations through phases of product ideation, design and commercialization.This comes from the fundamental belief that if you design products to meet actual needs of user/consumers in collaboration with them, then the chances of commercial success in the marketplace grow multi fold. Being a designer at heart, Mayank loves researching innovative product ideas through user-designer collaboration, as well as multi-disciplinary partnership(s) within product team(s).
Currently, Mayank manages a “legion extraordinaire” of cross disciplinary professionals responsible for delivering critical for success aspects of AppUp Products and Service, including exploratory/user research, Interaction Design, Visual Design, product definition & finally, shepherding product through software life cycle.
Tom Webb
Mentor
BA Vassar College (Economics)
Tom Webb is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Bear Deluxe Magazine, an award-winning environmental arts publication based in Portland and distributed nationally. The Bear Deluxe has been recognized by Print magazine, Utne Reader, Orion magazine, the Oregon Cultural Trust, the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Literary Arts for editorial and design excellence. Tom Webb is also executive director of Orlo, the magazine’s nonprofit publisher, and an editor at Portland State University. His writing has appeared in publications across the region, and he is a board member of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission.
Stephen Weeks
Mentor
M. Arch. Princeton University
BS University of Virginia
Since joining Boora Architects in 1998, Stephen has established himself as a leader in the design of arts education and performing arts centers. His award-winning work for colleges and universities across the country, as well as local arts organizations, reflects an understanding and appreciation for multi-disciplinary artistic endeavors. Stephen’s design solutions, including the new Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center for the University of Texas, are rooted to concepts of place and sustainability. Spaces are flexible and technology-rich to meet evolving pedagogies and dynamic production requirements. Stephen is also actively involved in the local arts community including providing pro bono event space design for the annual Time-Based Art Festival hosted by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Aric Wood
Mentor
MBA Harvard University
BA The Johns Hopkins University
Aric Wood is Dachis Group’s Chief Operating Officer. Aric joins Dachis Group’s executive team from XPLANE, where he was CEO and also led the firm’s business transformation practice, helping companies envision an improved future and define a strategy, roadmap, and campaign to execute breakthrough results. With deep operating experience in general management and new product development, Aric has a keen interest in leveraging stakeholder insights to identify opportunities and drive innovation, and has appeared in publications and broadcasts including CNN, Business Week, and Inc. Magazine. Aric is the Vice Chairman for the nonprofit Business for Culture and the Arts, and is an active promoter and speaker in support of the arts and its impact on culture and society.
