Erin Cuevas

The has announced that architect Erin Cuevas is the Harry der Boghosian Fellow for 2024-25. Cuevas will succeed current fellow, Christina Chi Zhang.

The Boghosian Fellowship at the School of Architecture—established in early 2015 in memory of Harry der Boghosian ’54 by his sister Paula der Boghosian ’64—is a one-of-a-kind program designed to give emerging independent creatives the opportunity to spend a year developing a body of design research based on an area of interest while teaching at the School of Architecture.

Fellows play a significant role at the school by enhancing student instruction and faculty discourse while supporting both research and the development of research-related curriculum valuable to architectural education and the discipline.

During the 2024-25 school year, Cuevas will teach an architecture studio and two professional electives focusing on her research project, Redefining Performance, which aims to advance independent, progressive and emerging design practice, stretching architecture into adjacent artistic realms and localities, bridging disciplines and communities alike. Students will push boundaries of animated mixed media representation and discover design opportunities within the unique Venn diagrams of their own interests.

‘Redefining Performance is a growing body of scenographic practice at the intersection of performance art, interactive digital media and architectural installation, participating in the evolution of theater into immersive experiences that blur the line between audience and performer,” says Cuevas. “The interdisciplinary and highly collaborative nature of the research embodies collective creativity and thought exchange between diverse participants across phases of researching, designing, capturing and experiencing the work.”

Like the eight previous Boghosian Fellows, Cuevas will work closely not only with faculty and students at the School of Architecture but will also explore interdisciplinary collaborations within the University and its various centers and colleges. Her research will culminate in a participatory public performance, expanding the School of Architecture beyond traditional bounds of the studio environments, activating spaces on campus, and engaging students, faculty and local artists and communities in a collective scenography.

Dismantling the privileged view in lieu of a shared stage, advances the inclusive potential of scenography by employing storytelling of underrepresented voices, site-specific public community events and accessible emerging technology. Often in collaboration with Jana Masset Collatz, as part of their co-founded design practice, CMLA, Cuevas’s work has been showcased in venues such as L.A. Dance Project Studios, the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, ACADIA and Architektur Galerie Berlin. Her practice has also received recognition through residencies, grants and published work spanning disciplines, including the Northwest ByDesign Film Festival, Cultured Magazine’s Young Architects list, Goldsmiths’ motion capture residency program and the World Stage Design conference, where CMLA received the first-place design award in 2022.

Prior to joining Syracuse Architecture, Cuevas was the director of global retail story design at Nike Inc. in Beaverton, Oregon, where she provided design direction of new global retail and seasonal concepts—most recently focusing on the installation for the 2024 Olympic Games. She received a graduate degree with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California (USC). Cuevas taught architecture and digital media at the USC School of Architecture from 2017-2022.

“Having followed the work of Boghosian Fellows over the past years, I am inspired by the program’s dedication to elevating diverse emerging talent and fostering new perspectives in the field of architecture,” says Cuevas. “The Boghosian Fellowship is an opportunity for me to expand the traditional architectural discipline through a unique and highly personal concert of elements—dance, architecture, storytelling and creative technology.”

The Boghosian Fellowship has helped the School of Architecture attract the best and the brightest emerging professors. Previous fellows include Maya Alam (2016-17), Linda Zhang (2017-18), James Leng (2018-19), Benjamin Vanmuysen (2019-20), Liang Wang (2020-21), Leen Katrib (2021-22), Lily Chishan Wong (2022-23) and Christina Chi Zhang (2023-24).

To learn more about the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, the .

Jacques Safari Mwayaona

Combining his background in instructional design with an understanding of diversity and inclusion, Universal Design for Learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Jacques Safari Mwayaona G’22 is making a name for himself in the field of educational development.

A Faculty Development Fellow in the University’s (CTLE) and a graduate of the School of Education’s , recently Mwayaona received double recognition from The Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, or . He also presented two sessions on student-faculty partnerships at the November 2023 POD Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Include Everyone

Mwayaona’s first award is the , named for a former POD Network president and awarded to educational development professionals for “their accomplishments to advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their work” and for promoting the integration of DEI into teaching strategies.

Mwayaona humbly suggested his second award—a Graduate Student, Professional Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Development (GPPD) , with similar membership and stipend benefits as the fellowship—be offered to someone else. The committee suggested a compromise. Mwayaona would keep his award, but the benefits could go to another: “Keeping me on the award list allows me to mentor new GPPD awardees for years to come.”

The POD Network awards committees had noticed and rewarded Mwayaona’s work with CTLE that is helping students become active participants in their learning process, an initiative known as .

“My work is about building faculty-student partnerships that empower students to share their perspectives,” Mwayaona says. “Normally, a professor has all the power when producing knowledge, but when students have a say, they can participate in the knowledge creation process by actively sharing with the faculty what is helping them learn and what is not.” For instance, Mwayaona says, students may suggest new strategies that motivate them to learn that the faculty can try out.

Moreover, empowering students and establishing a power-sharing dynamic in the classroom is an equitable practice that increases diversity and inclusion because it allows every student the opportunity to share their perspectives and be heard, “making it easier for faculty to include everyone and make the classroom cultural responsive,” Mwayaona says.

Harnessing the Power

Mwayaona observes that a master’s degree in instructional design was a strong launching pad for his burgeoning career in educational development, saying, “It helped me learn how to integrate technology to improve learning effectively.”

The latest technology to change the educational landscape is AI, which Mwayaona and his CTLE colleagues are introducing to faculty through .”We are helping faculty embrace AI, harnessing the power of the tool but at the same time not putting the learning process in danger,” he says.

Understanding AI is its own learning process for instructors, observes Mwayaona, who recently earned a certificate in Designing and Building AI from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“As AI was being introduced, people were afraid of it, mostly because they didn’t understand it and because media coverage fueled fear,” Mwayaona says. “Now some professors are integrating AI fully into their classrooms, but others are still cautious about the harm it can do. They really want to understand how it works. If we continue to have these interdisciplinary conversations on AI across campus, I think it will help to lower anxiety.”

Mwayaona says there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to integrating AI. “Its use depends on the subject you are teaching or the domain you are in. Literature professors won’t use AI the same way as those in architecture. … Our suggestion to faculty is to focus on and adapt the learning objectives and students’ learning process rather than the final results.,” Mwayaona says, adding that one way AI is disrupting college learning is through its ability to produce quick results from a short prompt.

In other words, AI is getting better at producing a final result.

Instead, Mwayaona suggests, AI could be embraced as a starting point of inquiry. “Say you are writing a paper on the French Revolution—multiple authors and texts can be summarized by AI so that the student can then go on to generate their own ideas.”

AI Is Not Magic

Turning to another of his professional interests, Mwayaona says one benefit of AI is its potential to promote (UDL).

UDL takes into account multiple ways people learn, engage and express themselves. “It can be difficult for instructors to account for all students,” says Mwayaona. “If you really want learning to get better, it should be adapted to the needs of each student. AI can help build that adaptive content.”

At the same time, Mwayaona urges caution: “AI is not magic. We must build guardrails so it does not harm the student.”

“AI is not magic. We must build guardrails so it does not harm the student.”

—Jacques Safari Mwayaona G’22

One of AI’s notable flaws is bias, which has been described as AI’s “” or even “.” “AI brings a lot of bias along with it because of the way it consumes available training data,” says Mwayaona. “We know that data contains a lot of bias, and when AI learns from a biased dataset, it can include it in its algorithm.”

Because AI can throw out —e±ą±đ˛Ô —results, its work and the data it relies on must be well-curated. “So when people ask me if AI is replacing jobs, one answer is to say that we still need controls on what AI produces, as well as people to check it, on top of other opportunities AI brings,” Mwayaona says.

Learn more about the School of Education’s , or contact Professor Moon-Heum Cho at mhcho@syr.edu or 315.443.5259.