About the Panelists

Andrei Harwell is an architect and urban designer. He is a design critic at the Yale School of Architecture and is senior project manager at the Yale Urban Design Workshop and Center for Urban Design Research. At Yale, he has taught advanced design studios with visiting faculty including FAT, muf architecture/art, Brigitte Shim, and KPF. Since 2008, he has taught in the joint Yale-China studio with Alan Plattus, examining issues of rapid urban development in Shanghai and Beijing. Before coming
to Yale, he was a project architect in the New York office of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, where he collaborated on a number of award-winning cultural and institutional projects. His research and design work has been published in The New York Times, Architectural Record, Building Design, mu-dot, Constructs, and Russian Life, and has been exhibited in Europe, the U.S., and China. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 and his Master of Architecture (post-professional) from Yale University in 2006.

Samuel Jamier is the Senior Film Programmer and Curator at Japan Society and senior programmer at The New York Asian Film Festival, organized by Subway Cinema. Prior to his work with at Japan Society, Jamier  was Senior Program Officer at The Korea Society, where he designed and executed cultural programming initiatives including an annual program of 60 public lectures and workshops. He has also worked with  the Cultural Services of the French Embassy as a Program Officer. Jamier possesses doctoral, MA and BA degrees in English Literature, Comparative Literature, and Medieval Philosophy, with Honors, from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and is an Agrégation Laureate in Modern English Literature and a graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He also completed postgraduate studies at Tokyo University, Japan, and King's College, London, England.

Jini Kim Watson received her PhD in Literature from Duke University in 2006 and since then has taught postcolonial theory and literature at NYU. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the Asia-Pacific, comparative modernities, theories of architecture and urbanism, and questions of political modernity. She has published on postcolonial East and Southeast Asia in the journals Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Literature and Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, and is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is currently working on a new book project which is concerned with the problem of authoritarianism in postcolonial literature and theory.

Jini regularly teaches undergraduate classes on Asia-Pacific literature, film and culture, as well as an introductory course in postcolonial studies (with Professor Toral Gajarawala). Her recent graduate seminars have included “Theories of Architecture and Space,” “Place, Space and the Postcolonial,” and “Literary Dictatorships.” Alongside literary and cinematic texts, these classes have included architectural and Marxist theory, philosophies of place and space, as well as readings from political theory and anthropology.

Jinhee Park AIA, received a Master in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.F.A. in Industrial Design from Seoul National University. She has received numerous awards including the 2009 AIA Young Architects Award and the 2007 Young Architects Forum Award from the Architectural League of New York. She is currently a Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Previous appointments include the Morgenstern Chair Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critic at the Boston Architectural College. In addition she has taught an interdisciplinary industrial design / architecture studio as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Houston.  She is an active AIA member, serving on awards juries, and speaking at national conferences, serves on the Architectural League of New York's Young Designers Committee, and is NCARB certified.

John Hong  AIA, LEED AP, received a Master in Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.Sc. in Architecture with Honors from the University of Virginia. He has received many awards including the 2006 AIA Young Architects award. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and previously was a Lecturer in Architecture at Northeastern University.  As an active AIA member, he has served on the ArchitectureBoston editorial board as well as AIA awards juries. He is a LEED accredited professional and is NCARB certified.