SheBuildsWaves : The Quarterly Conversations
Tue Dec 10, 6:30 PM - Tue Dec 10, 8:30 PM

SheBuildsWaves is excited to bring you the fourth and final edition of The Quarterly Conversations for 2019!

What we will be talking about ?

The Wrap Up: Life Beyond Design.

This will be a night of night of clinks and story-telling, reflecting on 2019 and anticipating 2020!

Who will be speaking?

Samantha Josaphat – Principal , Studio 397 Architecture PLLC

Samantha Josaphat is an Architect and the founder of Studio 397 Architecture. Part of a mere 0.3% of Architects, she founded her firm and named it STUDIO 397 after her accomplishment of becoming the 397th African American female architect achieving licensure in the USA. Studio 397’s work range from traditional Architecture to New York Fashion Week exhibitions.

As President of the National Organization of Minority Architect’s New York Chapter, her chapter recently hosted the 47th Annual NOMA Conference and Exposition with a record high attendance of over 1,200 professionals. Samantha is also a design studio professor at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School or Architecture.

Samantha recently started serving on the Penn State Architecture Alumni Board and received the AIANY’s Women in Architecture Award this year. In 2018 Samantha was a finalist in the Time Square Valentine Heart Design competition, a member of the Beverly Willis Foundation Emerging Leaders 2018 Cohort, and exhibited at the United Nations visitors center and UN centers globally.

Alicia Koledin -Founding Principal, AKcelerate

Alicia’s career has been riding a 20-year-long roller coaster of emotions (often simultaneous joy and self-doubt), along with varying degrees of financial solvency.

All left-and-right-brained, her experience in architecture, passion for music, and love for journalism always had a troublesome ménage à trois. “First, I wrote about music… Then I designed a recording studio… So I got a job in acoustics… Where I wrote a lot… Then I worked in architecture. That’s when I decided to focus on marketing.” Wait…What?! Marketing? “They told me I could write about architecture.”

Past tumult notwithstanding, Alicia now lives the dream (sort of) since establishing her own marketing consultancy, AKcelerate, in 2017. An idealist at heart, it’s difficult fo