Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity

Tila leads the CRE2 operations infrastructure, ongoing programming and Funding Opportunities, and leads the Center’s communication and engagement strategies. Prior to CRE2, Tila was at the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis where she served as the project coordinator for the Divided City initiative, a multi-disciplinary project examining race, cities and urban segregation. Prior to joining the Center for the Humanities, Tila worked at Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) in Washington, D.C., as the lead lobbyist on domestic policy issues. There, she lobbied Congress on federal budget spending priorities and criminal justice reform. Tila is a poet and skilled community building strategist, policy analyst, and activist. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Assistant Director for Research and Public Engagement at the Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Her work engages with campus-community partnerships, environmental justice, and digital publishing. She supports the humanities center’s key initiatives and collaborates with the broader St. Louis humanities community to develop programming. She also co-organizes the Sumner StudioLab with Matthew Bernstine, a community-engaged hub located at historic Sumner High School that launched in 2022 and is supported by the Mellon Foundation as well as WashU’s Office of the Provost. She earned her PhD in English from University of Wisconsin-Madison

Director of the Sam Fox School’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice

He leads socially engaged design initiatives and supports practices and scholarship for the College of Art, Architecture, and Kemper Museum. 

He is passionate about working at the intersections of creative practice and rooted processes that demonstrate how designers can serve as powerful voices for social justice on global and local stages. As an educator at the Sam Fox School, he teaches core courses in the Urban Design graduate program and interdisciplinary seminars where he develops creative pedagogy that integrates participatory design with applied creative and humanist practices. He previously served as the senior urban designer and planner for WashU at the Office’s of the University Architect & Real Estate. Prior to St. Louis, Matt worked for over a decade in the private sector as an urban designer and planner on large-scale infrastructure and city-building initiatives. Matt holds a Master in Urban Design from WashU and a Masters in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia.

Bruce Lindsey, a licensed architect, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He served as dean of the College & Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design from 2006-2017. He was the head of the School of Architecture at Auburn University from 2001-2006, also serving as the co-director of the Rural Studio and Paul Rudolph professor. Lindsey was a member of the faculty in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University from 1987-2001. He served as associate head of the School of Architecture from 1994-2001, and held a joint appointment in the school of art.

Lindsey served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in 2015 and served as Co-PI of the Mellon funded Divided City project from 2014-2023. A native of Idaho, Lindsey holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University.

Julia is a project coordinator and research assistant on the Engaged City project. She graduated in 2025 from WashU with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and minors in Studio Art and Creative Practice for Social Change. As a William H. Danforth Scholar and Goldman Fellow, her undergraduate experience was defined by the interdisciplinary teams and cohorts she engaged with. She is passionate about spreading accessibility and equity in design, demonstrated by her past advocacy and community service with organizations such as Building Futures, Ability WashU, and Camp Courageous. During her time at the Sam Fox School, she was selected for the 2025 Summer Public Design Workshop and the 2024 Design Futures Leadership Forum, worked as a shop monitor, and studied abroad for a semester in Florence, Italy. Before joining The Engaged City, she was an architectural intern at Neumann Monson Architects in her hometown of Iowa City. In her free time, Julia enjoys playing ultimate frisbee and soccer, traveling, spending time with family, trying new restaurants, and taking photos. You can see some of her art and food content on her Instagram page, @juber.creates!

Hariett is a student fellow on the Engaged City project, assisting with key initiatives like data collection and organization for the community asset map. Having had the opportunity to be an Office of Undergraduate Research fellow and Humanities Digital Workshop fellow, Hariett is passionate about interactions with digital humanities across disciplines. She is also interested in the ways visual culture, including public art, can represent communities and tell history through a perceptible lens. Hariett is currently a BFA candidate in studio art with a second major art history & archaeology at Washington University. Along with collaborating on the Engaged City project, she is a 2026-27 Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellow at the Kemper Art Museum.