Venesa Alicea-Chuqui, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP

Venesa Alicea-Chuqui AIA, NOMA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, an Architect, Educator and Advocate is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Architecture. She served as an Equity in Action Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow within Michael Graves College School of Public Architecture from 2022-2024. She has her masters in Urban Policy and Leadership and will be continuing  her research on energy equity and design justice through community power.

A registered Architect in New Jersey and New York, she is Founding Principal of NYVARCH Architecture, a collaborative Architectural Practice focused on building community and equity through design. Formerly an Associate at Dattner Architects, where she worked for over 11 years on a diverse range of projects in New York City, she has over 15 years of experience designing multi-family sustainable affordable, and supportive housing developments and civic projects, she is committed to working with local communities to develop good design, both sustainable and socially conscious. 

She is the President of the Architecture Alumni Group of the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, her alma mater, where she has also taught the Coop Internship and Professional Practice classes. Committed to design justice in the built environment, she’s an initiative and core organizer of Dark Matter U and Design as Protest, a former co-chair to the AIANY Diversity & Inclusion and Emerging New York Architects. She is past chair of the AIANY Puerto Rico Resiliency task force, a 2019 Fellow of the Association for Community Design. She served on the AIA Small Firm Exchange as the New York State Representative from 2020-2021 and the Vice Chair for Outreach in 2022. She currently serves on the Board of  Trustees for AIA Newark and Suburban.