Sheila Kennedy will give a public lecture at Wurster Hall Gallery on soft infrastructure including her work on the Portable Light Project—a MATx non-profit design, research and engineering initiative that builds upon the skill sets of women makers in the developing world by integrating clean energy and lighting with textile craft traditions (www.portablelight.org).

Sheila Kennedy is principal at Kennedy & Violich Architecture (http://www.kvarch.net/). Kennedy received her Bachelor's Degree in history, philosophy and literature from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. Kennedy studied architecture at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and received the Masters of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where she won the SOM National Traveling Fellowship and was graduated with Distinction, the School's highest academic honor. As Associate Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Kennedy was Director of the M Arch II Program from 1991-1995 and is currently Professor of the Practice of Architecture at MIT.

Sheila Kennedy is the 2014-15 Berkeley-Rupp Professor of Architecture. The Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize awards a distinguished practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to promoting the advancement of women in the field of architecture, and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and the community.  Designed as a period for regeneration, this unique opportunity provides recipients with the chance to engage in creative scholarly pursuits during a semester-long professorship at the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley. During their residency at CED, recipients have access to the college’s resources and the broader University of California, Berkeley network of scholars. For more information, please visit: http://rupp.ced.berkeley.edu/

This event is part of the Spring 2015 Architecture Lecture Series at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. For other lectures in the series, see: http://ced.berkeley.edu/events-media/lecture-series/arch-lectures-spring-2015