The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is pleased to announce that on 15 November 2016, President Obama appointed Toni L. Griffin to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., and reappointed Alex Krieger, FAIA, to a second term on the Commission. On 28 December 2016, the President reappointed Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, to a second term and Earl A. Powell III to a fourth term on the Commission. Mr. Powell has served on the Commission since 2003 and has been its chairman since 2005.
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. Ms. Griffin also runs a private planning consultancy, Urban Planning for the American City, which she founded in 2009, and has held several public sector positions in Detroit, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.
Ms. Griffin received a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame and a Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Alex Kreiger, FAIA, is an architect and urban designer whose career has combined teaching and practice in working to improve the quality of place in major urban areas. He is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1977, and served as associate chairman of the Department of Architecture and chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. He is also a founding principal of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, a design firm established in 1984 that spanned the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and public space planning, and merged with NBBJ in 2010.
Mr. Krieger is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard University; he served as an advisory director of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design of the National Endowment for the Arts, and continues to serve as a design peer reviewer for the U.S. General Services Administration. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, is the Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where she has taught since 1993, also serving as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture as well as Dean of the School of Architecture. She taught previously at Cornell and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and practiced as a landscape architect with the EDAW and Hanna/Olin design firms. She was named one of the 25 most admired educators in the U.S. by DesignIntelligence in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
Ms. Meyer received bachelor and master’s degrees in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia and master’s degree in the history of architecture/historic preservation from Cornell University. In recognition of her contributions as an educator to the theory and practice of contemporary landscape architecture, Meyer was named a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2003, and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture in 2012.
Earl A. Powell III of Washington, D.C., has been director of the National Gallery of Art since 1992 and is an expert in 19th- and 20th-century European and American Art. From 1980 to 1992 Mr. Powell was director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which he transformed, according to Art in America magazine, "from a local institution to a museum of international stature." Mr. Powell also serves as a trustee of several nonprofit organizations including the American Federation of the Arts and the White House Historical Association.
Mr. Powell graduated with honors from Williams College and received his masters and doctorate degrees from the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. He also holds honorary doctorate degrees in Fine Arts from Otis Parsons Art Institute and Williams College.