Elise DeChard is a licensed architect in Michigan and New York.

With fifteen years of experience in the field, she has worked with small businesses, homeowners, artists, developers, and community stakeholders, designing everything from community art spaces to collaborative manufacturing centers to fortunetelling walls of TVs.

Before relocating to Michigan, Elise worked in architecture and development in New York City, notably for Macro Sea on projects like New Lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Philadelphia Coworking Space, as well as for Marvel Architects on New Lab and the Prince Street Residences.

From 2016 to 2018, Elise ran Tessellate, an experimental gallery and international artist residency, in a suburban garage in Pontiac. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, The Architect’s Newspaper, Wallpaper*, Design Milk, Cubic Journal, TreeHugger, The Oakland Press, Fox2 News Detroit, and Curbed Detroit.

She has also been recognized in Detroit Month of Design (2018-2021) and named a Notable Woman in Design by Crain's Detroit. Elise has taught at Lawrence Technological University and Kendall College of Art and Design.

Megan Finley is an up-and-coming architectural designer and an all-around excitable person. Prior to her foray into the built environment, Megan worked as a costume designer in various Bay Area theaters, often creating and constructing around seventy looks per production.

She returned to formal studies after the fires in her hometown of Santa Rosa, California, motivated by a desire to positively impact the region through advancements in architectural design, materials, and labor.

Megan’s work reflects her deep affinity for intense research and design theory, while showcasing a fun, out-of-the-box approach to serious propositions. Her projects have tackled topics like disaster-proof housing, 'post-occupancy prose,' and feminist architecture.

Pilar O’Hara is an architectural designer in the making, passionate about adaptive reuse, social infrastructure, and community engagement. Her portfolio is categorized by a thoughtful triptych—from new to old to borrowed—speculating on design narratives intrinsically tied to time, history, and recollection. By embracing the new, the old, and everything in-between, she contends we have much to learn from the past to create inspiring and hopeful future designs. Her former architectural proposals range from community center reimaginations to playful collective housing to itinerant libraries, always designing with connectivity and empathy in mind across multiple scales.

In addition to her commitment to inspiring positive change through architectural design, Pilar is equally invested in print media. As a former editor and designer of Dimensions, the student-produced journal of architecture at Taubman College, she is passionate about the interactions between text and visuals to create compelling narratives.