Seaside Prize 2025 Speaker Lineup

By Kimberly Stanley,

Marketing & Development Coordinator

SEASIDE Institute™ has announced speakers for the 2025 SEASIDE Prize™. These dynamic individuals will join us Feb. 7-9, 2025, as we honor the career achievements of this year’s recipients, Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson.

Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden is professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. A renowned scholar of the history of the American urban landscape and the politics of place, her works have been translated into over a dozen languages.

She is the author of many award-winning books including Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003), A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004), and Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 2002), titles that have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show. Her earlier works include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976) and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981).

A former president of the Urban History Association, and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, Hayden is the recipient of the Radcliffe Graduate Medal for outstanding scholarship, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, two awards for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in urban planning, the Donald Award and the Oculus Award for feminist scholarship. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute, the NEH, the NEA, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Devaki Kesh

Devaki Kesh is an architect and urban designer who is passionate about vernacular and local architecture, public space design, conservation, and form-based codes. She believes in three opportunities through urban design – social bonding, cultural expression, and ecological sensitivity.

Kesh is an Associate at Principle, an award-winning planning, urban design, and development firm committed to creating authentic places for human-oriented environments. She received a master’s degree in urban design from Georgia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from RV College of Architecture. In her free time, she enjoys making art, reading books, and being in nature.

Marina Khoury

Marina Khoury is an expert in sustainable urban redevelopment, regional and master planning, transit-oriented developments, and form-based codes. As a partner at DPZ CoDesign, she has been Director of its Washington D.C. area office since 2007. A licensed architect and fluent in several languages, Khoury has worked on the design and implementation of projects in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the Middle East including ground-breaking new codes around the world that mandate resilient urbanism.

She speaks globally on issues related to Smart Growth and affordable, sustainable, and walkable communities, including at the United Nations. She co-led the development of the successful Miami21 code, the country’s first form-based code and holds a strong track-record of getting such codes adopted in efforts to create a predictable framework for resilient places. Marina is one of 20 members on the Expert Committee of Global Forum on Human Settlements (UNEP-GFHS) International Green Model City (IGMC) Initiative, under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Marina is also active in Washington area civic groups, including the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), where she served as a Board member of the CNU-DC chapter from 2007-2012, and was made a Fellow in 2022. She served as Chair of the Executive Board of Smart Growth America’s Form-Based Code Institute (FBCI) from 2018-2021, is a member of the Lambda Alpha International George Washington Chapter, a member of the Urban Guild and a LEED Accredited professional.

Becky Nicolaides

Becky Nicolaides is a historian specializing in American cities, suburbs, and metro areas. She earned her doctorate in American history at Columbia University, then served on the faculties at Arizona State University West and UC San Diego. Her work focuses on the history of North American suburbanization, especially histories of suburban diversity.

Nicolaides is the author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago 2002), The Suburb Reader 1st and 2nd editions (Routledge, 2006/2016), and The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford, January 2024). She has written for Time Magazine, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and various academic publications.

She has worked as a consultant over the years on historic preservation projects and various film projects. She is co-coordinator of the L.A History and Metro Studies group at the Huntington Library and subcommittee co-chair for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s L.A. Civic Memory Working Group. Nicolaides has given numerous lectures and presentations at Princeton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, George Tech, University of Exeter, UK, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany, Université Clermont Auvergne, France, and Palacky University, Czech Republic. She is an affiliated scholar at the USC Institute on California and the West. She is married to a brilliant actor-film producer-engineer and they reside in the suburban foothills of L.A. with their two kids and two dogs.

Veronica Rivas Plaza

Veronica Rivas Plaza has a background in architecture, urban design, placemaking, and sustainability with over 8 years of experience. She advocates for creating more walkable and bicycle friendly communities to improve the quality of life for everyone. She currently works at Street Plans and is focused on the design, plan, and execution of multiple tactical urbanism projects. Some of these include the streetscape improvement plan for the Meatpacking District in New York City and the placemaking efforts to activate open spaces at Lincoln Heights and Richardson Dwellings Housing Projects in Washington, DC.

In 2022, Rivas Plaza was featured as a panelist at the Transportation Alternatives Vision Zero Cities situating the 15-minute city. She also joined the Forefront Fellowship at the Urban Design Forum (UDF), where she serves on the Forefront Fund Advisory Committee.

Galina Tachieva

Galina Tachieva is the managing partner of DPZ CoDESIGN, directing the work of the firm in the US and around the world. With more than 25 years of expertise in sustainable planning, urban redevelopment and form-based codes, Galina is the author of the “Sprawl Repair Manual”, an award-winning publication by Island Press, which focuses on the retrofit of auto-centric suburban places into complete walkable communities.

Multilingual, Galina has experience with projects across the United States, Latin America, Europe and Russia, including downtowns and urban revitalizations, regional plans, environmental conservation, new communities, and resort towns. Managing complex projects and teams, she has led charrettes and other public processes, from project initiation through implementation.

Galina maintains an active civic engagement. A Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) she has been leading its national Sprawl Retrofit Initiative. She is a founding member of the Council for European Urbanism (CEU), and she has lectured throughout the world. She has been a visiting lecturer and design critic at Harvard University, the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and at the University of Miami, among others.

Born and raised in Bulgaria, she received her architectural education at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy in Sofia, Bulgaria. Later, Galina received her Master’s degree in Urban Planning from the University of Miami School of Architecture. Galina is certified by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and is a LEED-Accredited Professional.

Emily Talen

Emily Talen is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago, where she teaches urban design and directs the Urbanism Lab. She holds a PhD in urban geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s in city planning from Ohio State. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Talen has written extensively on the topics of urban design, New Urbanism, and social equity. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles and four books (New Urbanism and American Planning, Design for Diversity, Urban Design Reclaimed, and City Rules). Her forthcoming book is titled Neighborhood (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of the Journal of Urbanism.

Registration for the weekend is available at seasideinstitute.org. If interested in sponsorship or member opportunities, contact us at admin@seasideinstitute.org