Venesa Alicea-Chuqui AIA, NOMA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, an Architect, Educator and Advocate, is the Founding Principal of NYVARCH Architecture, a NY/NJ based collaborative Architectural Practice focused on building community and equity through design. She is currently an Equity in Action Presidential Postdoctoral fellow at Kean University, School of Public Architecture, Michael Graves College in New Jersey, where her research will be focusing on resiliency, energy equity and community power. With over 15 years of experience designing multi-family sustainable affordable housing developments and civic projects, she is committed to working with local communities to develop good design, both sustainable and socially conscious. She was the 2022 Vice Chair of Outreach to the AIA Small Firm Exchange and is currently President of the Architecture Alumni Group of the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, her alma mater (B.Arch ‘05), where she has also taught the Coop Internship and Professional Practice classes. Committed to design justice in the built environment, she’s an active contributor to Dark Matter U and Design as Protest. She is past chair of the AIANY Puerto Rico Resiliency task force, AIANY Diversity & Inclusion and Emerging New York Architects committees, and a 2019 Fellow of the Association for Community Design.