Design Newsletter
2026 Design Newsletter
Message from the Program Head
Spotlight Stories
Faculty Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Program Head
The Corcoran Design program is going through big change. Yes, some things remain the same. We are an energetic faculty passionate about the singular power of design to bridge the beauty and imagination of the arts with literally all other modalities for doing and thinking. We are an eager student body charged with curiosity, versatility, and purpose as we seek and build pathways for envisioning and shaping a better world. The core of who we are is unmoved. But how we practice is experiencing a major renovation.
As you read through this email and review the Design program highlights from the 2025-26 academic year, you get a sense of the buzz. The evidence of who we are becoming is everywhere. From Design Lab to our collaborative coursework, we are establishing ourselves as integral to the experiences of the whole school. We are winning awards at the university and regional levels. And, through both our faculty and student research, we are shifting the possibilities for design study and practice at the Corcoran and beyond.
Our graduating students made visible the energies of redefinition at NEXT Festival 2026. A visit to our second-floor Flagg galleries unveiled graphic design as far more than a tool for visual communication and representation, but also a channel for challenging capitalist norms, disrupting exploitative systems, and healing community rupture. Our interaction design students, then, completely upended conventional appreciations of their field; their works engage technology critically—drawing in questions of culture, economics, and materiality—to introduce alternatives for how humanity uses media, organizes institutions, and expresses progress.
The developments behind the scenes are bigger still. Over the past eighteen-plus months, we have been rewriting our curricula to make even more of the above possible. Which is to say, the Design program is on the verge of an exciting new era—that we look forward to sharing in our next outreach.
Spotlight Stories
Design Lab Gives Students Real-World Creative Experience
Design Lab offers Corcoran students the opportunity to work as designers in a semi-professional studio environment while still in school. Supported by faculty and alumni mentors, the lab allows students to take ownership of real projects, from concept development and design decisions to production, coordination, and delivery.
This year, Design Lab led the work of crafting and producing the visual identity of NEXT Festival 2026. Under the direction of Assistant Professor of Design Marc Choi as art director and Program Head of Design Andrea Dietz as project manager, with mentorship from recent alumni Hung Nguyen and Madeleine Brown, students developed and managed the festival’s visual branding across multiple platforms. Their work included wall labels, web and social media content, a style guide, feature walls, and merchandise design.
Through this paid, hands-on experience, students built the collaborative, creative, and project management skills central to professional design practice.
Design Students Recognized for Creative Excellence
Corcoran Design students earned major recognition this year for work that bridges creative practice, research, and real world problem solving. In The Real Show, a student design competition presented by the George Mason University School of Art and sponsored by AIGA DC, five students from Design Studio II received awards for projects in branding and exhibition design. Caitlin Fanone earned Gold in Exhibition Design, Mariam Hegab earned Silver in Exhibition Design, Hannah Lord earned Silver in Branding, and Peyton Hunter and James Johnson-Milstein received Merit Awards in Branding. This year’s competition included 264 entries from 19 universities, with 95 works selected for the show.
Rising senior Marley Carolan also made Corcoran history as the first design student to receive a $5,000 Luther Rice Fellowship from Columbian College. Working with Professor Singh Rathore, Carolan will develop a visual framework for mapping multisensory performance systems.
Faculty Kudos
- Professor Marc Choi’s collaborative publishing initiative Track and Field was invited to present work as one of only eleven exhibitors representing the United States at the 2025 MISS READ Berlin Art Book Fair.
- Professors Marc Choi and Aasawari Kulkarni are leading their second annual summer field studio in Copenhagen, Denmark in late July.
- Professor Andrea Dietz continued a national book tour of her 2024 coauthored Routledge publication, The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education. And she led a private workshop at the Stairwell Los Angeles gallery in preparation for an expansion of her Support Structures research about the United States’ social contract with the arts and architecture.
- Professor Kevin Patton co-designed and coded Wayside.at, a sophisticated augmented reality application for mobile browsers, for/with artist/designer Andrew Kastner (MA in Exhibition Design ‘22), while he was in residence with Capital Fringe and the National Park Service.
- Professor Sam Shelton piloted the Collaborative Design Project course as a hub for creatives of all disciplines to mix knowledges and skillsets in the co-design of this year’s museum studies exhibition contribution to NEXT Festival 2026.
- Professor Nidhi Singh Rathore is setting the example for partnership-based pedagogical practices. Her leadership of the Engagement Lab course series through a successful partnership with the DC Department of Transportation, both positioned Corcoran students to make realworld contributions and established a lasting bridge between the school and the community. The arrangement, through which students developed design solutions to support crossing guard retention and safer streets in D.C., led also to the creation of internship opportunities for select students to build on their coursework professionally.
- Professors Aasawari Kulkarni and Nidhi Singh Rathore presented their collaborative research, “Design for, with, and by Diversity,” at the 2025 AIGA Educators Conference. Their work explores how we can develop a more structured framework for understanding the interplay between diversity and design, both in practice and pedagogy.
Alumni Class Notes
- Lyle Dennis, MA ’83, is between the Washington Metro Area and South Brazil. They are aiding in orchestrating the public relations campaigns for the sustainable development of the regional ecosystems and transportation infrastructure system. The campaigns are geared towards trade and development within the public and private sectors.
- Dagmara Weinberg, BFA ’06, is continuing to create fine art photography inspired by nature, beauty and complexity, recently focusing on large-scale compositions of cherry blossoms. Their work has been exhibited in several projects promoting environmental awareness through art. www.dagmaraweinberg.com.