Design Museum Mentoring

Judith Anderson
She/Her/Hers
Judith’s current focus is curriculum development & creating collaborative, cross-discipline opportunities for undergraduate students at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Teaching at all levels of the Industrial Design program, she employs human-centered design methods to design and draws on her engineering background to communicate meaningful & engaged experience. She is building relationships throughout the arts, engineering, design, business, healthcare, local government & academic communities to broaden student’s exposure to learn & practice their design skills. She began her career at GE as a mechanical design engineer, leading design, manufacturing and testing efforts for turbine components in aircraft engines. This was followed by several years providing design consultancy services in London, UK after receiving her Master’s Degree in Industrial Design Engineering at the RCA. In addition to her current teaching and department lead work at MassArt, she works through a.Concepts to provide design services.

Ashley Dunn
She/Her/Hers
After graduating from the University of Tennessee with a Bachelor of Architecture degree, Ashley relocated to the colder climes of Boston to begin her career at Dyer Brown. In her tenure with the firm, she has worked extensively on both client projects and marketing initiatives. As a licensed Architect, Ashley has leveraged her passion for client service and design to complete projects ranging from 4,000 to 400,000 square feet. She also currently teaches at the Boston Architectural College as an adjunct faculty member and is a committee member with the Boston Society of Architects. A native of North Carolina, Ashley is an avid runner, a college football fan (Go Vols!) and a craft beer enthusiast. In her free time, she loves to travel and spends more time on her wardrobe than she would care to admit.

Sara Hartmann
She/Her/Hers
Sara Hartmann is an educator and arts entrepreneurship change agent. As faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she founded the Creative Economy Business Incubator, a scale-agnostic program designed to support the unique needs of art, design, and cultural ventures. Sara also produces MassArt’s Creative Economy Workshop Series in partnership with the City of Boston. This popular series offers free business skills training and professional development for artists and designers. She has taught business and design at UMass Dartmouth, Simmons University, Mount Ida College and Lasell College.

David Lemus
He/Him/His
David believes the world needs more creative leaders so everyone can make experiences that customers love. He is a design strategist who partners with organizations to empower teams to be customer-obsessed to build the right products. In addition to his consultancy practice, he is an adjunct professor at the University of Portland’s Pamplin School of Business. David lives in a Tiny House on Wheels which he designed and built himself from the wheels up. Prior to being an independent design strategist, David was in-house at Capital One, where he worked on the Design Thinking and Strategy team which focused on changing the way the enterprise worked by empowering all employees with the tools and mindsets of design thinking. His team scaled practitioner and senior leadership programs throughout the risk-averse organization. Prior to Capital One, David was a senior consultant at Peer Insight, a service design and innovation firm where he led service design projects with Fortune 500 and non-profit clients. David previously led the Design Thinking Meetup community in Portland, OR. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Jessie McGuire
She/Her/Hers
Jessie McGuire is the Managing Director at brand design studio ThoughtMatter, leading a diverse team of artists, writers and strategists to create daring designs and identities for global brands, local communities, art museums and foundations, institutions and non-profits. Jessie has been integral in shaping the purpose and creative vision of ThoughtMatter, spearheading projects and campaigns that reflect the agency’s culture and mission, including a modern redesign of the U.S. Constitution and the recently launched For The People docuseries. She has raised awareness and support for socially progressive causes such as March for Our Lives, Girls Write Now and The Joyful Heart Foundation as well as on community-minded efforts for The New-York Historical Society, Downtown Staten Island and The Center for Arts Education. Jessie holds a BFA in Communications Design and Advertising Art Direction from Pratt Institute and a MPS in Branding from The School of Visual Arts. Before joining ThoughtMatter, she produced and designed projects for billion-dollar brands owned by Kimberly-Clark, P&G and Colgate Palmolive. In addition, Jessie formerly served as the Advocacy Chair on the board of directors of the New York chapter of AIGA, and is a regular speaker at conferences across NYC. When Jessie is not designing, she can be found running in Brooklyn—alone, in a race or after her two kids.

Nedret Konstantino Şahin
She/Her/Hers
Nedret is a designer and strategist who advocates for people. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she’s been calling Boston home for over the last decade. She’s a graduate of Bentley University, where she fell in love with psychology and information design. Since entering the field, she’s worked on projects for both city and state government, higher education, associations, foundations, healthcare, financial services, B2B and B2C organizations.

Jonelle Simunich
She/Her/Hers
Jonelle is a Senior Strategist + Consultant in Arup’s Global Foresight + Innovation team. She has a formal background in urban planning, practical experience as an architect and a perpetual curiosity for the world. Jonelle believes the key to building a better world is an ability to generate unique experiences that will impact lives through our physical design. In her role at Arup, she delivers projects that amplify positive change to shape our communal built environment. Jonelle is currently exploring sustainable futures as well as Arup’s planetary boundary city initiative (#planetaryboundarycity) both with the aim to design more regenerative environments and outcomes. She aims to help clients and collaborators understand and plan for their daily and communal built futures.

Tracy Swyst
She/Her/Hers
A senior leader in Design Operations, Tracy’s career has networked her with a countless number of design professionals from nearly every discipline. She is a savvy choreographer of resources, stakeholders and team members, balancing competing needs while confidently addressing conflict and keeping people accountable. Tracy brings a working knowledge of the mechanics and operations that fuel the process of graphic design, branding, marketing, industrial design, and user experience design in varying many forms. When faced with a complex business problem, much like a designer she’ll consider all of the variables, aligning and realigning them, iterating the process, until the most effective solution has been arranged. She enjoys the challenge of identifying the core issue, and the nearly audible spark of arriving at the right solution. Clients include AIGA, Boston Society of Architects, DIGMA, IDSA, Filmmaker’s Collaborative, Bose Corporation, Korn Design, Marquis Design, and MITs Sloan School of Management.

J.R. Uretsky
She/They
J.R. Uretsky is an artist, performer, musician, and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island. J.R. worked as the curator at the New Bedford Art Museum where she exhibited Pete Souza (Chief Official White House Photographer for President Barack Obama) and Academy Award-winning (Black Panther, 2019) costume designer Ruth E. Carter. As an artist, J.R. has performed and exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, Florida, the ICA Boston, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, as well as the Museum of Art and Design in New York. J.R.’s work has been published in print, online, and video journals such as Headmaster Magazine, Gaga Stigmata, Big Red & Shiny, and ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. J.R. earned degrees from Biola University, the University of Connecticut, and Harvard University.

Cora Visnick, AIA, WELL AP
She/Her
Cora is an architect and interior designer at Boston-based Visnick & Caulfield Associates. Growing up on job sites and using floor plans as coloring books, Cora fell in love with watching drawings and plans come to life in the form of beautiful, functional spaces. After receiving a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Architecture, Art, + Planning at Cornell University, Cora continued her education at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, + Preservation, earning her MS in Real Estate Development.

Matt Neidhardt
He/Him/His
Matt graduated from MassArt in 2018 with a B.F.A. in industrial design and a minor in sculpture. He’s a Prototype Specialist at Fresco Design, where he works with industrial designers to design and build models and prototypes for product development.