Penn State University

Mallika Bose is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Associate Dean of Research, Creative Activity and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. In this role she supports and promotes arts and design research/creative activity and is an advocate for expanding the role of arts/design research in higher education and society. Graduate education is at the core of the research enterprise in higher education, and she works actively to diversify the student body and the types of research/creative activity undertaken in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. Mallika is committed to making visible the role of arts and design in equitable development, human flourishing and the responsible stewardship of our planet.

Mallika is trained as an architect specializing in Environment-Behavior Studies. She is interested in how the built environment impacts human behavior especially for disadvantaged groups. Her research areas include: Built Environment and Active Living/Healthy Eating; Public Scholarship and Community Engaged Design and Planning; Gender and Development; and Design/Planning Pedagogy. Her scholarship has been published in Landscape Journal, Habitat International, International Development and Planning Research, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and Journal of Urban Design among others.  She co-edited a book on community-engaged teaching/scholarship titled – Community Matters: Service-learning in Engaged Design and Planning – which received the 2015 Great Places Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). She served on the board of EDRA for several years and was the Chair of the EDRA Board of Directors in 2012-13. In 2016 Mallika joined the National Advisory Board of Imagining America – Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She co-directs the Collective of Publicly Engaged Designers (CoPED), an initiative of Imagining America.

Dr. Paul Shrivastava is Chief Sustainability Officer of Penn State University. He is also the Director of the Sustainability Institute, and Professor of Management at the Smeal College of Business.  Prior to this he served as the first Executive Director of Future Earth global research platform.

Paul is an academic entrepreneur.  He was part of the team that founded Hindustan Computer Ltd., one of India’s largest computer companies.  He founded the non-profit Industrial Crisis Institute, Inc. New York.  He founded the journal Organization and Environment, (published by Sage Publications).  He was founding President and CEO of eSocrates, Inc., a knowledge management software company, and the founding Chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management.

Paul’s research uses science and arts to develop transdisciplinary solutions to sustainability challenges. His current focus is on implementation of Sustainable Development Goals. He is working with colleagues at Penn State, at Future Earth and at the United Nations to develop programs for implementing SDGs, and monitoring and measuring their progress. He believes that infusing sustainability across research, teaching, community and student engagement at Penn State University’s 23 campuses can help us implement sustainability across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Paul received his Ph. D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He has published 17 books and over 100 articles in refereed and scholarly journals.  He has served on the editorial boards of numerous leading management education journals. His work was recognized with a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and IIM Calcutta Distinguished Alumni Award.

Erin M. Coe is the Director of the Palmer Museum of Art and Associate Clinical Professor in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State.  Since her appointment in September 2017, she has worked on establishing the vision and strategic direction of the Palmer Museum of Art including its collection and exhibition program and oversees the planning and implementation of the museum’s mission and goals. She is at the forefront of the University’s initiative to construct a new university art museum at the Penn State Arboretum scheduled to open in 2023.

Coe is the former Executive Director of The Hyde Collection, an accredited art museum and historic house located in the Capital Region of New York. She led a major capital project that included an expansion of and renovations to the museum’s 1989 wing. Moreover, she secured a major gift of postwar Modern art that resulted in the addition of a new gallery dedicated to Modern and Contemporary art that opened in June 2017. Prior to serving as Director, Coe was the museum’s Chief Curator for fifteen years. During her tenure she curated more than forty exhibitions, authored over a dozen publications, contributed to national arts periodicals, and juried several regional and national exhibitions.

Coe was the curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George organized by The Hyde Collection in association with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in 2013. She is the co-author of the exhibition catalogue, which was honored with an Award of Excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).

Erin has degrees from the University of New Mexico (B.A.); the University at Albany, State University of New York (M.A.), and worked on her doctorate in the history of art and architecture at Boston University.

Sita Frederick was named Director of the Center for the Performing Arts @ Penn State in 2021. Frederick, a Dominican and Canadian-American dancer who performed with Urban Bush Women, most recently served as director of community engagement at Lincoln Center from 2015 to 2020, where she led a team that presented inclusive family-arts programming on and beyond the Lincoln Center campus. During her tenure, she also launched new mentorship and internship programs for young people, and created an expansive residency program for community artists. Prior to Lincoln Center, Frederick developed her partnership and facilitation skills by working with Urban Arts Partnership as the program director for Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE), a federally funded professional development program for educators in New York City. Under her leadership, the EASE program expanded to Los Angeles Unified School District and local arts organizations in an initiative to prepare teaching artists with strategies to teach non-disabled and disabled students in integrated arts classes.

In addition to Urban Bush Women, Frederick has performed with Arthur Aviles Typical Theater and Merian Soto Performance Practice. In 2004, she and her collaborator, visual artist Jose Miguel Ortiz, co-founded a dance theater company, Areytos Performance Works, to create multidisciplinary community-based projects that explore themes of power, colonization, migration, race, gender and culture. Frederick currently serves as a mentor for Women of Color in the Arts’ Leadership through Mentorship program and as a board member of Word Up Community Bookstore in Washington Heights, New York City.

Frederick holds a bachelor of arts degree in English and dance from Swarthmore College and master of fine arts in new media art and performance from Long Island University, Brooklyn.