Folayemi Wilson named as Penn State Architecture’s first associate dean for access and equity

The co-founder and principal of blkHaUS studios, Folayemi Wilson has been appointed as first associate dean for access and equity in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, effective August 14th, 2021.

Wilson is an artist whose career and projects have been concentrated on uplifting the marginalized, from communities to young people. Proof of this is her Chicago-based studio, blkHaUS, founded in 2016 with designer Norman Teague, as a socially focused collaborative design studio dedicated to using design as an agent of change.

She is a professor of art and art history at Columbia College Chicago, where she’s also co-director of academic diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Wilson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She has been awarded two times with the Graham Foundation Individual Artist Grant (2019 – 2016) and has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Propeller Fund. Her books, catalogs, reviews, and articles have been published since 2009.

Towards her appointment as dean for access and equity in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, she said: “I look forward to sharing my ideas about how to encourage cultures of belonging and systems of equity and inclusion, as well as learning from new colleagues in the College of Arts and Architecture and the university-at-large.”

Here you can find the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture news of Wilson’s appointment.

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