OUR SPEAKERS

BESTOR ARCHITECTURE | PRINCIPAL

BARBARA BESTOR, FAIA

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.

Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealthy density” Blackbirds housing, groundbreaking retail and restaurant flagships, dazzling and dynamic workspaces for major LA corporations, award-winning experimental residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context. Many of these projects balance a strong instinctual modernism with an engagement in popular culture   and media. 

While maintaining a practice, Barbara has continuously taught at Southern California’s leading design schools from SCI-Arc to Woodbury University, where she is also currently the executive director of the Julius Shulman Institute. Currently Barbara is pursuing a collaborative exhibit on the work of architect Paul Williams, which will be on view in 2017.

LACMA | DEPARTMENT HEAD AND CURATOR,
DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN 

WENDY KAPLAN

Wendy Kaplan has been at LACMA since 2001. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, Glasgow Museums in Scotland, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

A leading expert on late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century design, she has authored, co-authored, or edited many books on the subject such as California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way” (2011), The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World (2004), Leading "The Simple Life": The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain (1999), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1996), Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945 (1995), The Arts and Crafts Movement (1991; French edition 1999), and "The Art that is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America (1987; reprint 1998), as well as organized major exhibitions on these subjects.

She is currently working on the exhibition Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985, scheduled to open at LACMA in September 2017. 

DIRECTOR OF LA PLUS

MARK VALLIANATOS

Mark Vallianatos is Director of LAplus. Mark is a policy analyst and advocate who has worked and taught on issues of planning, housing, transportation and food justice. He is co-founder of Abundant Housing LA and serves on the zoning advisory committee to re:code LA. Mark also enjoys researching the policy history of 'building blocks' of Southern California, like food trucks and single family houses. Mark is also the director of LAplus a new civic voice for those who want to say yes to a brighter future for the LA region. 

You can follow Mark on Twitter at @markvalli and @realLAplus.

POLICY DIRECTOR FOR ABUNDANT HOUSING LA

SHANE PHILLIPS

Shane Phillips is policy director for Abundant Housing LA, a volunteer organization committed to addressing the region’s housing shortage and improving affordability for residents at all income levels.

During the day he works as project director for Los Angeles Streetcar, Inc., and in the evenings he writes about housing and transportation policy at his blog, "Better Institutions". Shane is an advocate for thoughtful density, car-free and car-lite living, and innovative policy that focuses on win-win (rather than zero-sum) solutions. Most Angelenos support more open and inclusive policy with respect to immigration; Shane hopes to bring that same welcoming spirit to the local level, and to tear down the invisible walls that prevent so many from accessing the opportunities that our city has to offer.