info=<font color="#ff6600"><b>Vanessa Keith, AIA</b></font> is a Principal at StudioTEKA.  She is a registered architect who received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the recipient of the Dean's Merit Scholarship, won the Dales Portfolio Competition, and was awarded the Will Melhorn Prize in Architecture for her work in architectural theory. While at Penn, she was also granted the Lewis Davis and AIA Fellowships for academic excellence and achievement in drawing.</p></b><br><p><br>Vanessa received her Master of International Affairs Degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, graduating with a concentration in Economic and Political Development and a focus area in Urban Planning.  A Dean's Fellow while at SIPA, she was involved with the organization Megacities in evaluating innovation transfer projects in Cairo, Bombay, and Manila, and collaborated on projects with the United Nations Center for Human Settlements' National Committee for HABITAT.  She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Columbia University, with a major in Philosophy of Religion.</p><br><p>Prior to founding StudioTEKA, Vanessa worked for Wiel Arets in the Netherlands on the Groningen Stadium and Arena Tower projects, and in New York at Rafael Vinoly Architects on the CCNY/SAUDLA project, a conversion of an existing library into the new City College architecture and design facility.  At Rogers Marvel Architects she was part of a team of designers who invented a patented anti-terrorist collapsible trench system for the  Battery Park City Streetscape project, an innovative security upgrade and landscape project in Lower Manhattan involving NYMEX and the World Financial Center.  She has also worked for Kieran Timberlake Associates in Philadelphia on the Berkeley College Restoration project at Yale, and for Smith-Miller and Hawkinson on the Museum of Women in New York.</p><br><p>Vanessa has been a Research Fellow at the Winston Foundation, and is an advisor to Edu-Tourism, Inc., an organization dedicated to forging partnerships and supporting projects related to community and economic development in Jamaica.  In 2007, she was invited to participate as an International Studio Director for the XV Quito Biennale in Ecuador, where she led a group charrette in a study of urban and suburban conditions adjacent to the Machangara River. In November 2008, Vanessa was invited to present StudioTEKA's research on sustainable urbanism in a lecture entitled "Clip-On Architecture: Tropical Deforestation and Potential Solutions to the Climate Crisis," to Saskia Sassen's Global Urbanism class at Columbia University. She has taught in the University of Pennsylvania's Summer Studio, a foundational course for incoming graduate students of architecture, and has been teaching independent architectural design studio courses since 2002, the latest of which is a graduate level interior design studio at the Pratt Institute in New York.