These nine innovators make up Harvard GSD's Loeb Fellowship class of 2023

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced the 2023 class of Loeb Fellowship winners.

A total of nine mid-career individuals working in fields of activism, horticulture, visual arts, real estate development, architecture, and others were selected out of a field of 131 to form the fellowship’s 52nd cohort, which will see an extension of the collaboration begun last year between the program and Harvard’s ArtLab.

As fellows, the group will have access to a host of intellectual activities during a year-long residency on the GSD campus with the overarching aims of increasing community revitalization and improving social conditions in the U.S. and abroad.

The nine incoming Loeb Fellows are:

• Mariana Alegre, Lima, Perú; founder, Ocupa Tu Calle and Sistema Urbano
• Dario Calmese, New York; artist and founder, The Institute of Black Imagination
• Pamela Conrad, San Francisco; Principal, CMG Landscape Architecture and Founder, Climate Positive Design
• Claudia Dobles Camargo, San José, Costa Rica; First Lady of the Republic of Costa Rica 2018–2022
• Natalia Dopazo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Coordinator at the Care Infrastructure Program (Centers Against Gender Violence and Community Infrastructure), National Ministry of Infrastructure
• Badruun Gardi, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Co-Founder and Chairman, GerHub
• Shamichael Hallman, Memphis; Former Senior Library Manager, Memphis Public Libraries
• Rebecca McMackin, Brooklyn; Director of Horticulture, Brooklyn Bridge Park
• Derwin Sisnett, Memphis; Co-Founder and Partner, Maslow Development Inc.

Calmese is also the 2023 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow. Director Bree Edwards said his "exploration of history, race, class, and humanity through his own cross-disciplinary creative practice will engage all aspects of the ArtLab community in meaningful discourse and artistic development.”

About the rest of the Fellows, Curator John Peterson said: “Activism is in Loeb Fellows’ DNA. The 2023 Fellows have been addressing social migration and housing, gender and resource equity, and environmental justice, along with a host of other societal challenges that manifest in the built and natural environment. Their intelligence, creativity, and commitment further the Fellowship’s legacy of social engagement through practice.”

Applications and nomination requests for the 2023–24 cycle will open in September. More information about applying to the Loeb Fellowship can be found here.