2025-26 Rome Prize selections invite a fresh crop of architects to invigorate the American Academy

The American Academy in Rome has announced the winners of the 2025-26 Rome Prize, naming five architects as part of the 35-person cohort that will reside there in the Eternal City for a yearlong fellowship beginning in September. This year, they will be joined on the 11-acre campus by invitees to a new 1-3 month residency program. That group includes Susan Chin, Lesley Lokko, Glenn LaRue Smith, Brent Leggs, and Christine Sun Kim, among others. 

The architects/proposals selected for this cycle are: Akima Brackeen of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for Sonic Impressions (Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize) and Cory Henry of Atelier Cory Henry for Borders of Belonging: Rome's Public Spaces as Arenas of Democracy and Dissent. Tameka Baba of the Ohio State University Knowlton School, Sean Burkholder of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School, and Karen Lutsky of the University of Minnesota College of Design were selected in the Landscape Architecture category. 

Heather Scott Peterson, a Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University, won the Design category's Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize for her proposal titled Etchings and Accretions: The Geomicrobial Transfiguration of Rome.