Competition Jurors
LaVerne Wells-Bowie
LaVerne Wells-Bowie is a Professor Emerita of Florida A&M University’s School of Architecture. Her approach to architecture intersects environment, culture, community and collective memory. She also brings an engagement of fine arts to architectural practice, formerly having had a career as a textile designer. Professor Wells-Bowie has engaged students as culturally conscientious design scholars in local, regional, national, and international environs, including the Gullah Sea Islands of her familial heritage. Her extensive research work in the Caribbean led to publication of an official design guidebook for cultural conservation within development in historic preservation districts of Eastern Caribbean countries. Professor Wells-Bowie’s architectural administrative leadership includes management of the International Competition for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, on the mall in Washington DC.
She is a Fulbright, NEA, NEH, and McKnight fellow and is a recent inductee into the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s College of Distinguished Professor.
Diane Jones Allen
Diane Jones Allen is a landscape architect, author, and program director of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington. The work she creates is committed to environmental justice, sustainability, and the cultural significance of landscape while advocating for the transformative potential of design. As principal of DesignJones, LLC, a landscape architecture firm based in New Orleans, Jones Allen has connected local sites of importance with the larger scales of ecological systems and resiliency in the face of climate change. Jones Allen’s tremendous contributions to the field have consistently shown how the complex environmental issues of today link with the role of local communities in making a more sustainable and just world.
Ben Crawford
Ben Crawford leads architectural practice in Omniplan’s Dallas studio, working with clients and peers to create award winning design. For three decades he has enjoyed guiding the creative process, remaining engaged from conceptual initiation to delivery of completed projects. His passion for crafting spaces that shape the human experience is a through line in his portfolio of commercial, corporate and civic work.
Service to community and profession has been a continual thread in his career through academic lecture and critique, speaking at professional panels and conferences and more personally, as board member for non-profits focused on community service through design and education. He currently serves as a board member of ACE Mentorship of DFW and the Architecture and Design Foundation of Dallas, as well as supporting Transform1012, a Fort Worth social justice coalition creating the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing as Chair of the Building Committee.
Steve A. Prince
Steve A. Prince is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, and currently resides in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the Director of Engagement and Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Muscarelle Museum at William and Mary University. Prince received his BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana and his MFA in Printmaking and Sculpture from Michigan State University. Prince is a mixed media artist, master printmaker, lecturer, educator, and art evangelist. He has taught middle school, high school, community college, 4-year public and 4-year private, and has conducted workshops internationally in various media. He has worked with several church denominations across the nation spreading a message of hope and renewal philosophically rooted in the cathartic nature of the Jazz Funerary tradition of New Orleans.
Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle
Dr. Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle is a Professor of Architecture at Hampton University. She has taught for more than three decades strongly advocating interdisciplinary education, research, and design. Dr. Sánchez’s professional architecture involvement and scholarship are focused on collaborative design work attending to the needs of underserved communities considering history, culture, technology and environment, particularly waterfront locations. Among her projects are graphic relational databases for mapping historical districts, and adaptive kinetic systems as analogical vehicles to teach about digital modeling, complex systems, and sustainability. She has written and lectured on mapping the city, architectural pedagogy, adaptive architecture and collaborative design.
Sánchez del Valle has received an ASEE NASA LaRC Fellowship, an FRN-NYU Summer Scholar in Residence Fellowship and a Fulbright Hays Collaborative Senior Scholar award among others. She has served on the boards of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), and is currently a Director of the Board of the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). She represents Hampton University’s Architecture Department in the Equity in Architecture Education Consortium. Professor Sánchez del Valle is a member of the College of Architects and Landscape Architects of Puerto Rico (CAAPPR).