Marcus Samuelsson in conversation with Thelma Golden, Toni L. Griffin and Mark Raymond

Celebrated chef Marcus Samuelsson will share reflections on race, class, place and equity in the American food landscape, drawing from his forthcoming book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. He will then be joined by GSD Professor in Practice and founder of urbanAC, Toni L. Griffin; Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Mark Raymond, Director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. The group will come together for a conversation exploring the deep and intertwining relationships between memory, identity and authorship that exist for Black creatives who reference, make and keep place through their work.

Marcus Samuelsson is the acclaimed chef behind many restaurants worldwide including Red Rooster Harlem, MARCUS Montreal, and Marcus B&P in Newark, NJ. Samuelsson was the youngest person to ever receive a three-star review from The New York Times and has won multiple James Beard Foundation Awards including Best Chef: New York City and Outstanding Personality for No Passport Required on PBS. He is the author of multiple books including The New York Times bestselling memoir Yes, Chef and his latest book– The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem. His podcast titled This Moment with Swedish rapper Timbuktu is out now.

Follow Samuelsson on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at @MarcusCooks.

Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began her career in 1987 before joining the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. She returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and was named Director and Chief Curator in 2005. Golden was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Obama in 2010, and in 2015 joined the Barack Obama Foundation’s Board of Directors. Golden was the recipient of the 2016 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. In 2018, Golden was awarded a J. Paul Getty Medal. She has received honorary degrees from Bard College, the City College of New York, Columbia University, and Smith College.

Toni L. Griffin is the founder of urbanAC, based in New York, specializing in leading complex, trans-disciplinary planning and urban design projects for multi-sector clients in cities with long histories of spatial and social injustice. Recent and current clients include the cities of Detroit, Memphis, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

Toni is also Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and leads The Just City Lab, a research platform for developing values-based planning methodologies and tools, including the Just City Index and a framework of indicators and metrics for evaluating public life and urban justice in public plazas.

Most recently, Ms. Griffin was a Professor of Architecture and Director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Toni has also held several public sector positions including, Director of Community Development for Newark, New Jersey; Vice President and Director of Design for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation in Washington, DC; and Deputy Director for Revitalization and Neighborhood Planning for the DC Office of Planning. She began her career as an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP in Chicago, where she became an Associate Partner.

Ms. Griffin received a Bachelors of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame and a Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 2014, Toni was the Visiting Associate Professor and Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning, in the Department of City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley. Toni has several articles on urban planning and has lectured extensively in the United States, Europe and South America and has published several articles on design, urban justice, legacy cities and Detroit. In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed Toni to the US Commission on Fine Arts.

Mark Raymond is an architect and educator. He has practiced on his own account and in collaboration with others on architectural and urban planning and design projects in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the Caribbean and has also been actively involved with architectural education, lecturing and teaching at institutions globally. After graduating from the Architectural Association in London he worked on projects in Europe with Norman Foster, Conran and Ulrike Brandi before returning to Port of Spain, Trinidad and establishing his own practice. Mark recently completed a PhD through RMIT’s invitational creative practice-based research programme and recently accepted the position of Director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa – which he hopes to take up once the borders reopen. Current research interests address the engagement of design pedagogy and practice in processes of transformation and social justice.