Dr. Kirin Joya Makker, M.Arch. M.A., Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose practice spans visual media, text, and installation. Using visual and material-based storytelling, she interrogates structures of power and space as a social construction, material culture and medical misogyny, women’s history in design, and ecological protections. Her arts-based research employs several media, including hand drawing, cyanotype, watercolor, sewing, and book arts. A Professor of American Studies at Hobart William Smith in Geneva, NY, she teaches material-based storytelling using drawing, book arts, and sewing as methods for amplifying marginalized voices, examining inequality, and exploring social justice through heuristic learning. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. Her participatory art project, Womb Chair Speaks, has been exhibited at Winterthur Museum, Harvard University, and the University of Graz, Austria. Her book, Improving the Village: Stockbridge, Massachusetts and the Laurel Hill Association, was published by the Library of American Landscape History/Simon and Schuster in 2025.