National Academy of Design Announces Latest Cohort of Inductees
The National Academy of Design in New York announced on Tuesday its National Academicians Class of 2025. Founded in 1825 as the nation’s first artist- and architect-led organization for the promotion of design, the National Academy marks its 200th anniversary this year with the election of 27 individuals. Each year, the current members nominate and elect new Academicians to become part of the honorary society’s community, which is capped at 500 living members. The latest members join the distinguished ranks of the 2,400 artists and architects recognized since the organization’s founding—a Who’s Who of America’s most significant creative figures over the past two centuries. The 2025 class includes 10 architects—and a single landscape architect—from across the country.
In New York, Susan Rodriguez, formerly a partner at Ennead, opened her own namesake practice in 2017. The firm’s Davis Center, a recreational hub embedded into the landscape of Central Park, was August’s cover project. Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample are the cofounders of MOS Architects, a 2008 Design Vanguard. Meredith is a professor of architecture at Princeton University, and Sample at Columbia. Both are also recipients of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award and of the 2022–23 Rome Prize. Stephen Cassell, Kim Yao, and Adam Yarinsky are the principals of Architecture Research Office (ARO). Yao is also a professor of architecture at Columbia. In 2024, RECORD reported on ARO’s Center for Art and Landscape at Olana in New York’s Hudson Valley.
In Minneapolis, Julie Snow and Matthew Kreilich are the principals of Snow Kreilich Architects. Snow, who also teaches at the University of Minnesota College of Architecture, received a Women in Architecture Design Leadership Award in 2023. The firm’s Esox House in St. Paul was featured by RECORD earlier this year.
Victor “Trey” Trahan is founder and CEO of Trahan Architects, a practice with deep roots in New Orleans and an additional studio in New York City. Among its many high-profile projects in the Big Easy and beyond are the renovation of the Hurricane Katrina–damaged Caesars Superdome and the USA Pavilion at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka.
Chris Cornelius, a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, founded studio:indigenous, now based in Albuquerque. He is a professor at the University of New Mexico, and in 2025, a visiting professor at Yale.
Mia Lehrer is the founder of Studio-MLA, a prolific landscape architecture practice in Los Angeles and San Francisco whose major works include SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 2014–2018.
An in-person and online public induction celebration will be held in New York in November. Details are forthcoming. As part of being inducted, new members will contribute works—dubbed “Diploma Work”—to the National Academy’s collection, which now consists of more than 8,000 artworks and architectural models and drawings. An exhibition featuring the work of the Class of 2025 is being organized for the National Academy’s gallery on West 26th Street in Manhattan for the fall of 2026.
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