Professor, Architecture and Urban Design, and Director of the Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies, University of Washington

Sharon E. Sutton has been an architecture educator since 1975, having held positions at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan, where she became the first African American woman in the United States to be promoted to full professor of architecture. She is a registered architect, certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, and was once a member of the musician’s union in New York City.

The author of numerous books and scholarly and popular publications, Sutton’s research seeks to advance placemaking as a means of resisting and transforming the erasure place-consciousness deriving from global capitalism. Formerly a Kellogg National Fellow as well as a Danforth Fellow, Sutton has degrees in music, architecture, psychology, and philosophy. She is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, a distinguished professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, an inductee in the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, and recipient of the AIA Whitney M. Young Jr. Award.