MDD is delighted to extend a warm welcome to Visiting Assistant Professor, Leah Wulfman. Leah received a Bachelors of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and then went on to earn a Masters of Arts in Liam Young's Fiction and Entertainment program at SCI-Arc. They have taught all across the United States, including ArtCenter's Media Design Practices Graduate Program, IDEAS Program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, SCI-Arc, The School of Architecture, and most recently at Taubman College at The University of Michigan. Levi Crowley, the Social Media Intern for MDD, recently sat down with Leah to find out more about them and their work.... 

Leah spent most of their life being raised in Vermont competitively snowboarding, working as a bookseller, solving math problems and engaging in many forms of art and space making, before leaving to pursue a college degree in the Rustbelt, post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally attending the Honors Mathematics program, Leah quickly started yearning again for physical making, which led them to spending time around the Architecture woodshop. Here they were exposed to the concepts and studies of Architecture which folded in their love for making, buildings and materials, which ultimately resulted in them deciding to pursue a degree in Architecture. After graduating in 2016, Leah stuck around Pittsburgh for a year and a half working multiple jobs in an array of fields from Architecture, Graphic Design, Exhibition Design and Buildout, and Book Editing. 

In search of further personal growth and new opportunities, Leah moved to Los Angeles, California to take part in SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment program, for worldbuilding and VFX. They used the postgraduate thesis year to teach themselves game engine workflows for interactivity and spatial tracking. The project they developed centered around connections between physical and digital spaces and identities, using one's Google searches and location histories to produce customized immersive-VR psychic readings and therapy experiences. As part of these immersive experiences, Leah also built physical sets, including a custom-built Jacuzzi hot tub, to contextualize VR physically and more broadly spatially beyond the headset. During this year-long program, knowing that they wanted to teach, Leah also began to develop a syllabus for a hypothetical studio course, which focused on the role of magic and play and the overlap of physical puppetry, and digital tracking, rigging and twinning. The studio was designed as a collaboration between design students with the longest running puppet theater in the United States, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, where students would build, prototype and perform Mixed Reality puppets, objects, spaces and sets. With the development of the syllabus, Leah further honed their interest and expertise connecting, collapsing and designing digital and physical spaces, objects and realities through embodied play.

After graduation, Leah started working at a VR startup, designing immersive worker education and safety training procedures for OSHA. Their journey into teaching came about a half year after graduating; when their syllabus found its way to and was excitedly picked up by SCI-Arc Faculty and Design Immersion Days Coordinator Mira Henry, who vibed with the studio and the Octavia Butler references. Leah was then invited to teach a 3-day workshop project as part of Design Immersion Days, SCI-Arc’s Summer Design Program for High Schoolers. After a playful and instructive workshop for all, the aesthetics and interactions of the project and the resulting physical and digital puppets, sets and performances the students built during the workshop caught the eyes of fellow designers and teachers. Leah was then invited back to SCI-Arc for the Fall Semester to teach the first year undergraduate architecture studio, in which they continued to develop and lead Mixed Reality projects and coursework. Simultaneously, Leah began teaching at ArtCenter's Media Design Practices Graduate Program, and, in the Summer, would teach at the IDEAS Program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

By the end of the 2020, amidst the pandemic, Leah made a move to Arcosanti in Arizona to teach at The School of Architecture (formerly the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin), while continuing to teach online at SCI-Arc. While at Arcosanti, Leah spent time developing web-based games and experiential archives of the student’s design-build work, and working with the same students in the physical field of construction: measuring sites, pouring foundations, executing the design-build shelter projects. During this time, Leah was then invited for the teaching and design-research fellowship at Taubman College at The University of Michigan. Here, Leah developed Mixed Reality studios and seminars from the ground up and worked to create an accessible lab space where students could engage and physically prototype their work with spatial computing technologies. This fellowship experience was described as extremely formative and fulfilling for them. The curricula they developed during the fellowship focused on creative, discursive frameworks and design methodologies for working within mixed realities. Their studios revolved around the design of Mixed Reality gaming and toys, and in their seminar, students investigated contemporary realities of trash (including field trips to the largest scrapyard in Michigan and the Goodwill Outlet Bins)—what trash is, how it is understood and how it materializes in both digital and physical contexts. 

While at Taubman College, Leah learned of MDD and our division's search for a design educator whose work transcends boundaries between the digital and the physical. The rest is history.

To learn more about Leah's research you can check out this 'Humans of the U' profile here.