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Deborah Berke is one of the most high-profile and inspiring practitioners and instructors in architecture today. She is principal of Deborah Berke Partners, with whom she has created a distinct and lasting body of work. Berke sets the creative direction for the practice and brings her design vision to each project, culminating in the firm being named to the AD100 list for its residential work in 2022. The office's approach to architecture - informed by its pursuit of authenticity, love for the visual arts, and intellectual rigor - pervades its design processes and projects. In July 2016, Berke became the first woman dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where she has been a professor since 1987.

She was named one of Architectural Record's Women in Architecture Design Leadership awardees in 2021, and is the recipient of the 2022 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. Berke is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a Trustee and Vice President of the Urban Design Forum, a James Howell Foundation Board Member, a member of the Yaddo Board of Directors, and a member of the Pritzker Prize jury. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A. and B. Architecture) and The City University of New York (M. Urban Planning in Urban Design). In 2005, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Thomas de Monchaux is an architect and award-winning architecture critic. He teaches as an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, especially shepherding its Shape of Two Cities: New York / Paris program. His writing about design has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times, and in such journals as Log and n+1.