Erin Sterling Lewis, FAIA
In the small towns surrounding Yazoo County, Mississippi, Erin started to look for a platform to expand her appreciation for architecture and design. At the center of her design vision is a sense of community grounded in social responsibility. This practice and passion have led her to residential design - the homes where we build our first memories, the surrounding natural landscapes that sculpt our curiosity, and the little downtowns where we first stir up a healthy dose of trouble.
Erin is involved in various community outreach and volunteer programs. From 2004 to 2006, Erin served on the Raleigh Historic Development Commission. She served on the Raleigh Planning Commission from 2009 to 2015. In 2010, Erin joined the AIA North Carolina (AIANC) Board of Directors as the Young Architects Forum (YAF) Director and is President of AIANC. She is also a founder of ACTIVATE NC, which is a statewide AIANC outreach initiative to strengthen the civic role in architecture and design. Erin is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Erin occasionally teaches design studios as Professor in Practice and serves on the advisory board for the NCSU College of Design School of Architecture. In 2018, she was awarded a national Young Architects Award by the AIA. She earned a BArch from the University of Kentucky in 2002.
Oz Ozburn, AIA
Oz is an architect who excels in the natural chaos of life. For Open Studio, she uses this skill to anticipate her client’s needs and help them make design decisions with ease. She is an effervescent party host with a penchant for dogs that weigh more than she does, a zen-like mastery of cheese plates, and a practice of welding her own furniture. You will see her work along winding roads in Virginia, Illinois, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Michigan.
Before merging with o p e n studio, Oz independently ran two offices, AOA, a residential architecture firm based in Chicago, and Ladder Up, a women-owned social enterprise, training and equipping all-female teams to provide an in-demand construction service. Oz also founded Design Ecology, a collaborative that strives to find holistic solutions to issues involving urbanism, physical place-making, and gaps in the rural fabric caused by social inequalities while working with the Goldin Institute, a non-profit focused on global grassroots leadership development. Through these entities, she enjoyed collaborating with local stakeholders around community-driven social change and violence prevention, specifically in the South and West sides of Chicago. Oz previously had worked for Studio Gang as Project Architect, leading teams on projects including the University of Chicago Campus North Residential Commons, a net-zero campus for the Academy of Global Citizenship, and Spelman College’s Art and Innovation Center, among others.
Oz earned her BSArch from University of Virginia and her Master’s of Architecture from Yale University. She was awarded the 2012 Residential Architecture Award and the David M. Schwarz Travel Grant, which allowed her to research the architectural consequences of urban warfare in the Middle East. This work resulted in a publication titled "Architecture After Crisis" which documented cultural forms of post-traumatic reconstruction and how to design for risk.