University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, US, MArch, Architecture

Jessica A.S. Letaw was the Editor for Ampersand Michigan, a student-led publication working within the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Existing in the realm between a critical magazine and casual journal, Ampersand's primary focus lies with architectural productions, research, and discourse which express the state of the discipline from the recent past to the near future. Rather than respond to topics and methods that have trickled down through academic institutions, seasoned professionals and established ideologies, Ampersand has a bias towards ideas in their infancy, projects which don't know what they are, and conversations that have no clear precedent. Ampersand Volume Six "Sites of Decline" will be released for publication summer 2013.

Jessica completed her graduate work at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning in the professional Master of Architecture program. Her thesis explored the psychotic semiotics of the spaces of health, those spaces in which one passes time without thought, as the acceptance of spatialized cultural myths is the necessary consequence of the fictional narratives scripting individual days and lives, amplified to the scale of the social. Before Michigan, she completed undergraduate studies in German Linguistics with emphases in philosophy and international business.

In addition to serving as UM's USGBC-Student chapter communications chair + community liaison, she is also an organizer of Ann Arbor's Mission Zero Fest. This annual neighborhood sustainability festival, the only one of its kind, is comprised primarily of entertainment and education components, the latter of which Jessica is Director.