Jean Gazis

Hear ten compelling discussions on photography, equity in fashion and design, sustainable architecture, and more.
Pratt’s creative community is continually exploring areas as diverse as historical research, sound art, climate change, and neuroscience. These fascinating recent conversations with ten notable alumni and faculty members offer a wide range of new ideas and perspectives.
Groundbreaking Photography
Photographer Sylvia Plachy, BFA ’65, helped define New York City’s culture and nightl...

In Two Storm Wood, Philip Gray, who has published several thrillers and novels of historical suspense under other names, creates a moving love story hidden inside a harrowing and psychologically observant historical thriller.
In Oxford in the spring of 1916, Amy Vanneck, the sheltered only daughter of wealthy, well-connected, but stifling parents, chances to meet Edward Haslam, a gentle music teacher who grew up an orphan. Their clandestine, whirlwind romance will send them both down paths mo...

Graduate students Charlotte Böhning and Mary Lempres draw on the digestive power of mealworms to produce Chitofoam, a sustainable polystyrene substitute to help reduce plastic waste.
Charlotte Böhning, MID ‘23 and Mary Lempres, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’18; MID ’23, have been named finalists in the 2022 Lexus Design Award global competition. The award invites young creative talent from around the globe to develop original and inventive solutions that highlight the creative interplay between...

The Pratt Manhattan Gallery is now open to the public for the first time, welcoming visitors to its inviting new ground-floor space with From Forces to Forms, a new exhibition of works that explore the nature of form by engaging with the potent forces and processes of nature. (Registration is required to attend.)
The new gallery space was created as part of the extensive Pratt Manhattan building renovations completed last spring, with the aim of inspiring and energizing creative collaboration...

Most people tend to think of cities as being purely built environments of concrete, brick, steel, and glass, sprinkled lightly with spots of green in the form of human-made parks with well-groomed landscaping.
Well, think again! Even in a sprawling, dense metropolis such as New York City, nature is everywhere, if you only pay a little attention.
1. Observe Birds
It’s hard to open your eyes in NYC and not see a pigeon, starling, or house sparrow. Look for their nesting sites — pigeons along bu...

This absorbing new mystery centers on historical events that most Americans unfortunately know little about. The opening chapters read more like memoir than mystery, but the seemingly slow beginning pays off in compelling characters and authentic settings.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Aki Ito idolizes her older sister Rose, who seems brilliant, bold, and glamorous—everything Aki is not. The sisters are nisei, American-born children of Japanese immigrants, and feel constrained by in...

Jasmine Aimaq’s brilliant, riveting debut novel, The Opium Prince, is filled with vivid details, apt descriptions, pithy observations, compelling characters, poignant moments, and unexpected twists.
Daniel Sajadi, the privileged son of a wealthy Afghan War hero, heads a US foreign-aid agency dedicated to eradicating the booming opium trade. Traveling with his American wife, Rebecca, for a weekend getaway to celebrate their anniversary—and heal the rifts in their marriage—he hits and kills Tel...

Legal Momentum applauds the appointment of Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura as the first woman secretary general of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced her appointment by the FIFA Council on May 13, 2016. Ms. Samoura, who is Senegalese, is the first woman and first African to hold this post. She is a 21-year veteran of the United Nations who is currently the UN's Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Nigeria. She is expe...

What’s it like to hang out backstage with a rock star on tour? What kind of person sets out to become a groupie? Sherry Carroll spent her late teens and early twenties “past the barricade, through the security, inside the dressing room, and behind the hotel room door” and tells all about it in her memoir, Even Rock and Roll Has Fairy Tales.
This breezy tale of the author’s 20-year-long, on-and-off affair with Eric Burdon of Animals and War fame—they met when she was 18 and he was in his late ...