Elizabeth Kay Miller ’89 and Michelle Joan Wilkinson ’93 Named Harvard Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellows

Each year Harvard’s Graduate School of Design awards Loeb Fellowships to professionals who shape the built environment—architects, urban planners, artists, policymakers, and others. The fellows spend a year on research and dialogue focused on how their work might advance equitable social futures.

This year’s cohort includes two Bryn Mawr alumnae—Elizabeth Kay Miller ’89 and Michelle Joan Wilkinson ’93.

Miller is the executive director of Community Design Collaborative, which provides pro bono preliminary design services to Philadelphia-area nonprofits, creates volunteer opportunities for design professionals, and raises awareness about the importance of design in revitalizing communities. In 2005, she launched Infill Philadelphia, an initiative that uses design, community engagement, and strategic partnerships to address urban infill development. Topics addressed included affordable housing, food access, commercial corridors, industrial reuse, green storm-water infrastructure, play space, and sacred places. 

Miller served on the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 2011 to 2016 and the Design Advocacy Group from 2005 to 2011. A Growth and Structure of Cities major, she holds a master’s in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels School of Government.

Wilkinson, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, is working to expand the museum’s collections in architecture and design. In 2018, she served as lead organizer for the museum’s symposium Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now. She is engaged in an ongoing research project, V is for Veranda, about architectural heritage in the Anglophone Caribbean, and her most recent efforts explore issues of representation in architectural renderings. 

Formerly director of collections and exhibitions at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, she has also worked at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a 2012 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, Wilkinson completed a short-term residency at the Design Museum in London. A comparative literature major and Africana Studies minor, she holds a Ph.D. from Emory University.

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