From the early 1920s to the mid-1960s, the idea of interior design taught at Parsons School of Design was heavily dependent on the practice and writing of New York-based society designers like Elsie de Wolfe. In 1970, Parsons established a Department of Environmental Design under Chair Allen Tate. The Department was not a new entity, but a renamed and greatly altered version of the famed Department of Interior Design, which Tate and others had been in the process of remaking since 1964. Environmental Design was then a new discipline, purposefully open-ended and loosely interpreted by many universities and design schools across North America at the time. The Radical Shifts exhibition explored the transition from Interior Design to Environmental Design, tracking an often contentious transition in the remaking of a department utterly altered, with an ambitious intellectual agenda, a commitment to socially engaged design, and experimenting with new cross-disciplinary pedagogical methods.

Epstein, Danielle

As a student in Parsons' Interior Design MFA program, Danielle was co-curator on the Radical Shifts exhibition. Since graduating, Danielle has worked as a teacher, production manager, and design consultant.

Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is Director of Academic Affairs and Assistant Professor at the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design [CHECK IF CURRENT]. An architect by training, she received her Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Princeton University in 2003. Prior to coming to Parsons, she taught at Bard College, the University of Illinois in Chicago, and at Barnard and Columbia Colleges. Her scholarly foci are nineteenth-century architecture and urbanism in the United States, along with transformations to interior design pedagogy and practice starting in the mid-twentieth-century. The University of Chicago Press published her book, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City, in May 2009. She has published articles and reviews in many scholarly journals including AA Files, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Architectural Education, Technology and Culture, Design Issues, Grey Room, and Lotus International. She serves as faculty advisor to Radical Shifts: Reshaping the Interior at Parsons, 1955–1985, which initiated with her research into the history of interior design teaching at Parsons. Along with Kent Kleinman and Lois Weinthal, she is a co-editor of After Taste, a forthcoming book aimed at expanding the definition of interior design as a practice and as an academic discipline." ADD NEW BOOK

Scheir, Wendy

Wendy Scheir came to The New School in 2008 to direct the Kellen Design Archives for Parsons The New School for Design (a unit of The New School Libraries and Archives). The Kellen documents the history of Parsons since its founding in 1896 and houses archival collections that reflect and support Parsons' curriculum. In 2012, while continuing to lead the Kellen, Scheir established the first ever university archives at The New School. Scheir came to The New School from the New York Public Library, where she was Project Archivist on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to process the records of the New York World's Fair Corporation, 1939-1940. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, a Master of Fine Arts in Film, and a Master of Arts in History and Archives, all from New York University.