John Peterson, AIA, Founder & President, created Public Architecture in 2002 and joined its staff fulltime in October 2008. John serves as the chief spokesperson and strategist for Public Architecture as well as design director and a member of the board of directors. John maintains a small private architectural practice, Peterson Architects, which for over 15 years has dedicated an extraordinary amount of time to pro bono work, serving arts institutions, city agencies, community development corporations, nonprofit organizations, and social service agencies. John has been appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom to both the San Francisco Green Vision Council and Open Space Task Force. He is also an elected member of the South of Market Business Association board of directors as well as past chair and a current member of the Urban Solutions board of directors. John is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nice Modernist award from Dwell magazine and the Jefferson Award for Public Service. In 2009, John was recognized alongside Executive Director John Cary with the 2009 Designer of the Year Award from Contract Magazine. John earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. During the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Brad Leibin, Project Associate, joined Public Architecture in February 2009.  Since completing his MArch Brad was an architectural designer at the New York City offices of Tina Manis Associates and Field Operations, where he worked on the project teams of the Highline Park in Manhattan and the Surfside Residence, a 14-acre garden on the coast of Nantucket Island.  An essay written by Brad, on new models of design practice for addressing inequalities in the global built environment, was recently selected for inclusion in the 2009 ‘Unspoken Borders’ Conference at University of Pennsylvania.  In 2006, with Penn teammates, he was awarded first prize in the Edmund Bacon National Student Design Competition for a scheme to revitalize a fragmented, underutilized public space in downtown Philadelphia.  Brad earned his Bachelors of Arts in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded the Lewis E. Dales Travelling Fellowship as well as the Arthurs Spayd Brook Memorial Prize, Silver Medal, for distinguished design work.


Nick McClintock, Resource Development Fellow, began working for Public Architecture as a volunteer in February 2009 and joined the staff in December 2009. His position is made possible through the AmeriCorps*VISTA program of the Corporation for National & Community Service in partnership with Bay Area Community Resources (BACR). Nick recently returned from another VISTA position with buildingcommnunityWORKSHOP, a community design center in Dallas where he lived and worked on Congo Street, as part of the Congo Street Initiative. He has also partnered with the staff of Asian Neighborhood Design in San Francisco to advance their vocational training program to include weatherization, solar installation, and environmental education. Nick has also worked in a metal fabrication shop in Oakland specializing in custom furniture and architectural installations, and as a professional cook. Nick graduated from Middlebury College in February 2008, where he studied architecture and political science.


Liz Ogbu, LEED AP, Associate Design Director, joined Public Architecture in August 2006 and is responsible for design initiative selection, execution, and advocacy. She recently was selected as "Green Giant" by Steelcase, Inc. for her work in promoting environmentally and socially sustainable design. Previously, Liz was a designer at Simon Martin-Vegue Winklestein Morris (SMWM), an architecture and urban design firm in San Francisco. She has been the recipient of several traveling fellowships, including the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Through these grants, she has pursued research projects, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, examining the intersections in the socioeconomic and physical spaces of the informal sector. Findings from this work have been presented at several conferences both in the U.S. and abroad, and were the subject of her Master's thesis. Liz has also been involved with many community focused projects and organizations here in the U.S., including the launch of the Community Design: Now or Never website and its associated symposium; the Mayors' Institute on City Design; a design outreach program for local youth in Cambridge and Boston; and an affordable housing developer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Liz earned her Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Wellesley College and Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Cali Pfaff, Operations Associate, joined Public Architecture in August 2009. She is responsible for daily operations, social media, editorial support, and volunteer administration. Previously, she worked for the Berkeley firm, Fernau & Hartman Architects, in a similar capacity. Cali graduated with honors from the Urban Studies program at Brown University in 2008, where her studies focused on urban geography and politics of exclusion. Cali acted as the publicity head for Brown University’s Amnesty International chapter and spent one year at Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro. While in Brazil, she interviewed economically disenfranchised artists as the base work for her award-winning senior thesis on cultural appropriation and taught elementary English to Nação Graffiti, a crew of graffiti writers. In 2007, she received the Harriet David Goldberg '56 Endowment to study Brazilian immigrant art in New York City and Boston.

Amy Ress, Program Advancement Fellow, joined Public Architecture in August 2009. Amy’s position is made possible through the AmeriCorps*VISTA program of the Corporation for National & Community Service in association with Bay Area Community Resources (BACR). Amy’s interests are centered on the integration of art in public landscapes and community-oriented design. Her many experiences include interning at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, where she studied distortion and perception of space and volume through photography. Returning to San Francisco, she worked as the Architecture & Design Forum Coordinator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, supporting exhibitions, publications and programs--from SFMOMA Experimental Design Award (2001) to Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture (2004). Most recently, she was a design and research consultant for firms, including Hood Design and Culvahouse Consulting Group, and worked as a project management intern on the Better Streets Plan and the Great Streets Program at the San Francisco Department of Public Works. As an undergraduate, Amy studied art and photography at San Jose State University, and went on to earn her Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008.