Five faculty join the Sam Fox School for 2026-27 academic year

Several faculty will join the Sam Fox School in visiting positions for the 2026-27 academic year. They include Juan William Chávez, Mitzy Belén González, Jai Kumaran, Michelle Lee, and artist Chloë Bass as the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow.

Juan William Chávez, who has taught studio art at the school for several years, is this year’s Wallace Herndon Smith Visiting Lecturer. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Chávez is an artist, activist, educator, and beekeeper who collaborates on social-practice art projects related to community building, environmental issues, food sovereignty, environmental stewardship, and decolonization. He is also the founder and director of the art and ecology nonprofit Northside Workshop.

Mitzy Belén González joins as a lecturer in undergraduate architecture. An urban and architectural designer, her work is driven by the dialogue between architecture, landscape, and urbanism responding to diverse cultural and environmental settings. She practices as a designer at Overland International.

Jai Kumaran is the fall semester’s Ruth & Norman Moore Visiting Professor of Architecture. The founding partner of West of West, he leads design, strategic direction, and firm management. His work explores how art, culture, design, and technology can shape contemporary life. His studio’s work over the last decade has been widely published and awarded internationally, including by the New York Times, Dwell, Monocle, Interior Design, The Local Project, Architect’s Newspaper, FRAME Magazine, Hypebeast, Architizer, The Plan, Dezeen, and by multiple chapters of the AIA.

Michelle Lee joins as a senior lecturer in both graduate and undergraduate architecture. She researches the relationship between energy, form, materials, and culture in the age of climate change with a focus on adaptive reuse, healthy materials, intergenerational living, solar geometry, and facades. For over a decade, Lee practiced at Behnisch Architekturbüro in Boston, where she specialized in designing for daylight, natural ventilation, and solar rhythms and worked with leading fabricators of metal, ceramics, tensile membranes, glass, and mass timber for large institutional projects. Prior to Behnisch, she worked in Paris and Los Angeles on cultural projects with unique building envelopes such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Foundation Louis Vuitton, and the Broad.

Plus, artist Chloë Bass joins as the school’s Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. A multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation, her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (“The Bureau of Self-Recognition”), followed by a study of pairs (“The Book of Everyday Instruction”), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (“Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place”). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on “Since feeling is first,” a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law.