Mitzi Vernon

Architect, Concerned citizen, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Writer/Editor

Mitzi Vernon recently completed her 7th year as Dean of the College of Design at the University of Kentucky (UK). She is currently on a research sabbatical. Her administrative portfolio includes: 1) the Gray Design Building (a new adaptive reuse structure with Jeanne Gang & Studio Gang Architects, now under construction) to bring together the college units and a new program in Product Design with an arm to Biomedical Engineering; 2) rethinking the College identity with 3884: Stories of Design+Place, a narrative-based journal; 3) new faculty/staff/student councils of leadership in DEI and Technology; 4) reimagining micro-philanthropy and stewardship through a capital and scholarship campaign. A recent publication: “Studio Adjacent: Why Studio Education is still part of the Future” in the Winter 2022 issue of INNOVATION Magazine. Current scholarship: higher education micro-philanthropy; Fields Everywhere & the public understanding of science; industrial designer, David Lincoln Rowland; the scholarship of form; and the studio as method. Vernon’s career spans 30+ years of leadership, practice and teaching in industrial design, engineering and architecture. Vernon has taught at Virginia Tech, California College of Art (CCA), University of Southern California (USC) and Arizona State University (ASU). As originator of the project, Fields Everywhere, she has been the recipient of several patents and grants supporting her research in using design to promote the public understanding of science. She has led multiple and diverse NSF project teams. She was a CreativeMornings speaker in April 2017, delivering Form in Life in Lexington, Kentucky, and one of the inaugural speakers for 2012 TEDx Virginia Tech, delivering Mapping the Invisible.