Vasia Rigou
Greek-born Vasia Rigou, Newcity’s Design Editor, is a Chicago-based art critic and pop culture journalist, largely on the subjects of contemporary art, design, and fashion. She moved to Chicago in 2013 to study Arts Journalism at the School of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC,) where she was awarded the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship. She grew up to appreciate art after years of carefully planned, culture-filled travel itineraries and museum-hopping around Europe with her family. During this time, she received a bachelor’s in English Literature, in her native Athens; a master’s in Media, in Nottingham, UK; and studied foreign languages—English, German, and Spanish at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her writing—reviewing museum and gallery exhibitions, art fairs, fashion shows, and music festivals among others—has been published nationally and internationally both in print and online. In 2017, she founded and now serves as editor-in-chief of Rainbowed.—an independently published website focused on the visual and performing arts, digital media, and popular culture. When she’s not writing about art or looking at art—wine in hand, she keeps up with Chicago’s creative entrepreneurial and startup community, makes lists for pretty much everything, drinks immense amounts of coffee and takes cross-country road trips every chance she gets.
Contact: vasia@newcity.com Website: http://www.rigouvasia.com
Philip Berger
Philip Berger writes about design for Newcity. He has a day job at a law firm, too, but art, design and style are his passion.
Nicholas Cecchi
Nicholas Cecchi is an architectural designer born in Denver, educated in New Orleans and currently practicing in Chicago. He led the design department of a Denver-based boutique architectural and sculptural fabrication studio for three years after graduating from Tulane University with a Master of Architecture. Following this experience in design-build and digital fabrication he decamped for Chicago to finish the process of architectural licensure while working on various projects in commercial, multi-family residential, educational and civic architecture.
He is a published architecture writer, contributing pieces to leading publications as well as a regular column of architecture criticism to Newcity. Nicholas lives in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago where he can be found experimenting with new fabrication and design techniques, writing about architecture and urbanism, and watching the endless interplay of urban life from the stoop of his studio.
Contact: npc@nicholascecchi.com | Website: nicholascecchi.com
Journalist Isa Giallorenzo was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil and has elected Chicago as her beloved home since 2009. She runs the street-style blog Chicago Looks and wants to see this town become one of the fashion capitals of the world.
Taylor Holloway
Taylor Holloway is an architectural designer, social impact design researcher, and educator. She is founder of the Shared City Project, a built environment design and advocacy curriculum for high school students in Washington Park, Chicago. Her research and work examines design as a tool for the proliferation of equity within the build environment and has taken her to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Haiti, and to South Africa as the 2013 AIA Chicago Foundation’s Martin Roche Travel Fellow. You can find her in West Town Monday through Friday, and at the Lakeview YMCA on Sunday mornings.
Gregory Maher
Gregory works in community programming at Northwestern University and contributes to Newcity, The Cresset and The Seen. He formerly coordinated the interviews section at KNSTRCT magazine. His particular interests are the relationship between community history and design, the structure of information and design in the digital world, vernacular architecture, online exhibitions and new methods of digital storytelling.
Contact: gregorytmaher@gmail.com
Alan Mammoser
Alan Mammoser is a regional planner and writer in Chicago, and the author of “Beyond Burnham, An Illustrated History of the Chicago Region.”
Michael Workman
Michael Workman is an artist, writer, dance, performance art and sociocultural critic, theorist, dramaturge, choreographer, reporter, poet, novelist, curator, manager and promoter of numerous art, literary and theatrical productions. In addition to his work at The Guardian and Newcity, Workman has also served as a reporter for WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, and as Chicago correspondent for Italian art magazine Flash Art. He is currently producing exhibitions, films and recordings, dance and performance art events under his curatorial umbrella, Antidote Projects. Michael has lectured widely at universities including Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Illinois at Chicago, and served as advisor to curators of the Whitney Biennial. His reporting, criticism and other writing has appeared in New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, zingmagazine, and Contemporary magazine, among others, and his projects have been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, Artnet, The Financial Times, The Huffington Post, The Times of London, The Art Newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Art In America, Time Out NY, Chicago and London, The Gawker, ARTINFO, Flavorpill, The Chicago Tribune, NYFA Current, The Frankfurter Algemeine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice, Monopol, and numerous other news media, art publications and countless blog, podcast and small press publishing outlets throughout the years.
Yetta Starr
Yetta Starr
Yetta Starr, IIDA, LEED Green Associate, is the founding principal of Starr Design Associates, Inc., a commercial interior design practice specializing in workplace, education, civic, scientific, and showroom interiors as well as exhibits and visual communication projects. The practice engages with community-based initiatives supporting cultural identities impacting economic development. Yetta is a contributing writer to publications focusing on commercial design and industry trends.
Contact: ystarr@starrdesign.net
