UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Designer, urbanist and spatial justice activist Liz Ogbu will join the Stuckeman School at Penn State virtually at 6 p.m. on Feb. 9 to discuss the landscape of injustice and oppression that designers wrestle with today — particularly in the aftermath of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor murders and a still-raging COVID-19 pandemic — and what it could mean for designers to negotiate issues of race and space in service of repair and healing in communities.

Co-hosted by the Department of Architecture, “Design/ing in the Apocalypse” will be livestreamed by WPSU at watch.psu.edu/stuckemanseries as part of the school’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.

Ogbu focuses her work on sustainable design and spatial innovation in challenged urban environments around the world. From designing shelters for immigrant day laborers in the United States to leading a design workshop at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in 2012, she has a long history of engagement in the design for social impact movement.

Ogbu founded Studio O in 2012 as a multidisciplinary design studio that focuses on working with, and in, communities with vulnerable populations to create high impact models that can yield deep and sustained social benefits.

She has written for and been profiled in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic’s CityLab and the Journal of Urban Design. Her honors include IDEO.org Global Fellow, TEDWomen Speaker, Aspen Ideas Scholar, Design Futures Council Senior Fellow and one of Public Interest Design’s Top 100. 

Ogbu is a lecturer in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held teaching positions at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University and the University of Virginia School of Architecture. She also previously served as the Droga Architect-in-Residence in Australia, investigating urban marginalized populations and community development practices in the country.

Ogbu holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and art from Wellesley College and a master of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.