Toni L. Griffin is an architect and urban designer based in New York City. In 2016, she was appointed Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she develops and teaches values-based planning methodologies through the Just City Design Lab. She is the founder of the firm Urban Planning for the American City in New York, and through her practice she served as project director for the Detroit Work Project Long Term Planning Initiative and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework for urban transformation.
Previously, Ms. Griffin was a Professor of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture of the City College of New York, where she founded the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City in 2011. As founding director, she led the Center’s work focusing on such issues as the participation of people of color in architecture and related design fields. In 2014, she was the Visiting Associate Professor and Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held several public sector leadership positions, including Director of Community Development for Newark, New Jersey; Vice President and Director of Design for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation in Washington, DC; and Deputy Director for Revitalization and Neighborhood Planning for the D.C. Office of Planning. She began her career as an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, where she was an associate partner involved in architecture and urban design projects in London and Chicago.
Ms. Griffin received a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she taught as an Adjunct Associate Professor from 2006 to 2011.