Public Program

  • The World Around Summit 2025
    Beatrice Galilee and Satomi Blair
    Organizers
    New York
    Spring 2025
  • GRANTEE
    The World Around
    GRANT YEAR
    2024

Fundación Organizmo, “House of Thought,” 2023. Digital photograph. Photo: Felipe Camacho Otero

The World Around Summit 2025 is an all-day conference organized by writer and curator Beatrice Galilee that spotlights the most progressive ideas and projects across contemporary architecture, design, and beyond. It is held in-person in New York and broadcast live online. This event, like all The World Around (TWA)’s programs, is driven by the urgency of the climate crisis and reflects TWA’s mission to make architecture and design issues accessible to all. The Summit functions as a core sample of the crucial work happening within the built environment, showcasing forward-thinking ideas alongside commissioned time-based works relating to the conference’s themes. Given the event’s proximity to Earth Day, thematics center on ecological justice, abolition, rematriation, community-driven design, and more. It features winners of TWA’s Young Climate Prize, which offers mentoring and exposure to emerging designers/activists. The Summit asks: How do design and architecture provide ideas, infrastructure, and visibility for the stories and forces that shape the lives of millions? What might ecological redemption look like?

Beatrice Galilee is a curator, critic, and cultural consultant specializing in the field of contemporary architecture and design who founded The World Around in 2020 and serves as its executive director. Galilee is internationally recognized for her worldwide experience in curating, designing, and conceiving original and dynamic city-wide biennales, museum exhibitions, installations, conferences, events and publications, bringing together the world’s most important institutions with cutting edge practitioners. She is the author of Radical Architecture of the Future (Phaidon, 2021), and has contributed essays on contemporary architecture to books and catalogues all over the world. Prior to founding TWA, she was the first curator of contemporary architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she organized exhibitions and installations on the Met Rooftop, and public programs of contemporary architecture, art, photography, film, and design, launched In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, as well as acquisitions and collections research from 2014–19.

Satomi Blair, executive producer, has overseen all The World Around (TWA) Summits and In Focus programs. Blair is an actor, producer, and founder of 4Hawk Productions, an award-winning independent documentary production company committed to telling diverse stories of creative artists, makers, and activists. Blair produces all videos for TWA’s events and global platform. Films under Blair’s creative leadership have been a part of Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, Anchorage International Film Festival (Jury Award Winner), Miami Short Film Festival (Winner Best Documentary Film), Houston Cinema Arts Society/NASA CineSpace (Finalist), DocuWest, Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, Miami International Science Film  Festival (Winner- Best Micro-Doc). She is an alumna of The Women's Media Center; Progressive Women's Voices, and proud member of SAG & AEA.

Founded in 2020, The World Around (TWA) is a global nonprofit platform headquartered in New York, with a simple but ambitious mission: to rethink architecture. Taking the most critical issue of our time—the climate crisis—as the lens to view all of their activities, TWA connects with global institutions to craft unique and accessible public conversations that look beyond buildings to investigate the often invisible forces that shape our homes, cities, landscapes, and lives.