I am a teacher, designer strategist and impact entrepreneur with interdisciplinary expertise pioneering 3BL along the value chain within the manufacturing and designing businesses of international lifestyle luxury goods. My work, acknowledged in press for balancing design with social/environmental perspectives, was recognized with industry awards. My collections were developed for top-tier retail companies such as Lane Crawford, Umbra, Neiman-Marcus, Barney's Frontgate, Wholefoods and Banana Republic. Throughout my career, I have consistently fused design methodology with sustainable/resilience and fair-trade principles understanding the importance of scaffolding instead of separating the three fundamental pillars of sustainable business, people, planet and profit. As a Private Sector International Development Consultant for SMEs, I focus my design and management strategies on how they impact social innovation, empowerment and community development.
Early on, I worked on a variety of high-profile architecture and product design projects in New York and Milan. In the 1990s, I taught for the Small Business Support Project offered through the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Appointed as fulltime faculty, I am Co-Director of the MS Strategic Design and Management Program, Director of the Parsons Elab and an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons. The nexus of design thinking and business innovation where I teach studios and lecture courses and am part of the School of Design Strategies leadership. As director of the Parsons Entrepreneurs Lab, we aim to bridge the gap between academia and applied practice. In 2015, I became part of the advisory board for Thicket, a startup focused on the visualization and quantification of qualitative data. I continue to maintain my consulting practice investigating and applying strategic design thinking to startups and existing businesses market expansions, mapping across internal/external research, socio-economic, environmental impacts and resilience planning for a more holistic long term approach. I am a solution oriented inquisitive person with enthusiasm for taking on problems of all sorts, thinking, creating, collaborating and building things be it ideas, systems, concepts or products.
