2007 Urban Visionaries Honorees URBAN CITIZENSHIP Constance Milstein is a Principal of Ogden CAP Properties, a real estate and property development company in New York City. The Association of Real Estate Women and Real Estate Weekly listed her in the top fifty women in the New York metro area. An ardent supporter of sciences, arts and education, she is an active member of several nonprofit Boards including New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York City Parks Foundation and New York City Opera, and is Chairman of the Humpty Dumpty Institute, a Founding Member of Medical Missions for Children and Founder of Connie's Bakery. She also supports various programs at Columbia University, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and Metropolitan Opera, among many others. VISUAL ART Kara Walker is an internationally acclaimed artist best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. While her startling and controversial cut-paper characters of racial stereotypes have become her trademark, she has taken the medium in new directions, including puppetry, wall murals, magic-lantern projections and video. She has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others both here in the U.S. and around the world. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award, was the U.S. representative in the 2002 Biennale in Brazil and will participate in this year's Venice Biennale. Untitled, 1994. Cut paper on paper. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. ARCHITECTURE Santiago Calatrava is both an architect and an engineer who easily identifies with both disciplines and often creates innovative works that depend on a firm grasp of both the creative and structural aspects of design. Avoiding the apathetic acceptance of established forms, he uses his multi-disciplinarily skills to create sculptural surfaces and unusual spaces. Having realized most of his early work in Switzerland and Spain where he has exhibited extensively and won several awards, he has offices in France, Spain and Switzerland, as well as New York City. He is currently working on the Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center site and has plans for a residential tower at the South Street Seaport. ENGINEERING Craig Nevill-Manning joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist responsible for developing new high-precision search techniques for use in the Google search engine. He went on to found Google's first satellite software engineering center, here in New York City, where he is currently Engineering Director. Previously, he worked in the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Prior to Rutgers, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University where he developed eMOTIF, a software suite used by many pharmaceutical research laboratories. He has published 41 research papers and received a National Science Foundation Career Grant. EMERGING TALENT Jennifer Lee graduated from the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in 1997 and went on to co-found OBRA Architects with partner Pablo Castro in 2000. Ms. Lee and OBRA have been recognized with numerous honors including the Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York; they have also recently been featured in MoMA's Conversations with Contemporary Artists series. OBRA's winning competition proposal for Freedom Park Museum and Memorial in South Africa garnered a Chicago Athenaeum American Architecture Award. In 2006, OBRA won the annual PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program and their design, BEATFUSE!, was installed in the courtyard at PS1 Contemporary Art Center. The firm's first single-family residence will be completed this fall in Southampton, New York. Ms. Lee was named a de Montequîn Senior Fellow by the Society of Architectural Historians and was a 2006 fellow in Architecture/Environmental Structures from the New York Foundation for the Arts. BEATFUSE! in the courtyard at PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Photo courtesy of OBRA Architects.