J. Yolande Daniels is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture and a fellow of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney American Museum of Art in studio practice and cultural studies. Daniels’ practice combines independent design-research and architecture and design in studioSUMO, which she co-founded in 1995. Daniels’ work explores the spatial effects of race and gender in the built environment by revealing spatial narratives of resistance and autonomy. Daniels’ work has been exhibited widely including most recently in the 18th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition. In 2021 her project Black City: the Los Angeles Edition was featured in the exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Along with her fellow Reconstructions exhibitors, she is a cofounding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. This is an evergreen conversation, focusing on Yolande’s Los Angeles based research. We recorded in 2021 when Yolande was living in L.A. before moving to teach at MIT and shortly before the opening of her show at the MoMA. Yolande’s Black City project continues to expand. Learn more about the project here and follow on Instagram for upcoming venues. “As I started to do research, the narratives that I found had to do with the agency of the inhabitants and how they built community focusing on their power to shape the spaces around them. … African Americans are often made to feel that we have no history or that our history is only sorrow, but the people who were making the history, they were fighting all the time to realize good things for themselves and for their family and for others. That's what I see in these stories and I want others to see them too.” - J. Yolande Daniels, MoMA, 2020

This is a special bonus clip excerpted from EPISODE 14 in which art critic Shana Nys Dambrot interviewed poet, historian, and writer Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the Poet. Their full conversation, which is linked in the show notes, is wide ranging and beautiful, and we highly recommend listening to the entire thing, or watching it on YouTube, but we couldn’t resist pulling out Mike’s poem as a stand-alone. Mike and Shana's full bios, as well as Shana's five places interview, are linked in the show notes.

Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, is an acclaimed poet, professor, journalist, historian and tour guide. He teaches at Woodbury University, where he serves as the Coordinator of the school’s First Year Experience Program. He has published over 500 essays and poems, most recently two excerpts in Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters, edited by David Kipen (Stanford University Press, September 2023). He has delivered over 2,000 poetry readings, served as guest speaker at over 100 academic institutions, appeared on radio and television and hosted events in locations like Grand Performances and Getty Center. The second edition of his latest book, Letters To My City was just published by Writ Large Press in Summer 2023. Watch to the end to hear Mike speak one of his extraordinary original poems on Los Angeles, “Los Angeles A to Z”.

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter is an architect, educator and community leader advocating for architecture to advance environmental and social justice. She currently serves as President of Architecture for Communities Los Angeles (ACLA), a non-profit organization launched by AIA LA to focus on education and community outreach. She also serves as Chair of the Education Committee for the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB), and is Professor in the Architecture Department at East Los Angeles College, California’s largest community college. In partnership with Roland Wahlroos-Ritter, her architectural practice, W-ROAD, navigates transdisciplinary territory in the diverse type and scale of projects, and she has collaborated on multiple award-winning projects as architect and façade consultant. One of their latest projects is the renovation of the Los Angeles Mission, at 156,000 sf, one of the nation’s largest service providers of the unhoused. Ingalill has forged educational pathways and launched programs that support her vision of education for all. She served as Dean of Woodbury School of Architecture from 2016-2021, and has taught at Yale, Cornell, the Bartlett (UCL), and SCI-Arc. As founder and Director of WUHO, the Woodbury University Hollywood gallery, she produced over 100 exhibitions celebrating social justice-focused design. She was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 2018, received the 2018 AIA|LA Presidential Educator of the Year Award, the 2016 AIA California Council Educator Award, and was recognized by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s Most Admired Educators in Architecture and Design in 2018 and 2019.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She studied Art History at Vassar College, curates and juries exhibitions, writes prolifically for exhibition catalogs and monographic publications, and speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally. She is the author of the surrealist novel Zen Psychosis. She is the recipient of the 2022 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award for 2022. Shana called in from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she was on a writing retreat, so you may notice that the audio and video are just slightly choppier than usual. If you watch on YouTube you’ll catch a sneak peek of Laurie Lipton’s current project, a nearly 7ft x 20ft triptych aptly titled SMOKE. Watch to the end to see some of Osceola Refetoff’s gorgeous photography for Zen Psychosis and to learn Shana’s plus one choice. Discover more of Shana’s work on her website, instagram, and @shananys on every social media platform.

Los Angeles native Gary Baseman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the human condition through fine art, illustration, performance, film, fashion, and toy design. Known for his raw style and humor, his art has appeared in international publications (The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, Rolling Stone), games and toys (Cranium), digital collectibles (VeVe), and in the ABC/Disney animated series and feature film “Teacher’s Pet,” for which he was creator and executive producer. Baseman’s awards include multiple Emmys, a British Academy of Film & Television Arts award, and Fulbright and Sundance New Frontier fellowships. His many brand collaborations include COACH, Lladro, and Dr. Martens. His fine art has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America. We highly recommend watching this episode on our YouTube channel, as Gary shows several of his extraordinary drawings onscreen, his cat Bosko drops in several times, and we have embedded photographs from Gary’s long history in LA into the video. Big thanks to Gary for sharing his art, his photos, and his stories so generously.

Julie Eizenberg, FAIA, FRAIA, Founding partner of KoningEizenberg Architecture has given visibility to the design value and potential of community projects and people-oriented practice. Under her leadership, Koning Eizenberg has earned over 200 design and sustainability awards and been widely published in the US and abroad. The practice has been honored as AIA California’s Firm of the Year and, together with Hank Koning, Julie was recognized with the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal, the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award and, in 2022, inducted into the National Academy of Design. Julie teaches and lectures around the world and has shared the practice’s interests in influential monographs including “Architecture isn’t just for special occasions” which highlights the value of social engagement and ’Urban Hallucinations” which examines how the idyll of local shapes neighborhoods.

Ron Athey, born 1961, is a Los Angeles-based self-taught artist performing since 1981’s Premature Ejaculation noise/action collaboration with the late Rozz Williams. Influenced by the bands Christian Death, and Nervous Gender, Athey came into his own forming a performance troop in the 90s, making the so-called torture trilogy, 3 works that addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis in ritualistic, philosophical, and mythological stage scenes. Martyrs & Saints and 4 Scenes In a Harsh Life were development scene by scene in nightclubs, Deliverance (1995) was an ICA London commission. These works toured internationally including CCA Glasgow, Gallerija Kapelica Ljubljana, Eurokaz Zagreb, Inteatro XX Polverigi, Ex-Teresa CDMX, and Kampnagel Hamburg. In 1998 Athey began making solo work, premiering The Solar Anus at Galleria Kapelica Ljubljana, onwards through 20 cities until the pivotal Undercover Surrealism show at the Hayward Gallery in London, 2006. Since then Athey has moved between solos, opera collaborations, and a post-porn video project with Hermes Pittakos titled Pasiphäe, Witch Queen of Crete: A Gloryhole Origin Story, which showed in 2022 at the Long Beach Opera Film Festival via Dirty Looks. Two monographs have been printed on Intellect Press: Pleading in the Blood (2013) and Queer Communion (2021) to accompany the same-named Amelia Jones curated retrospective showing that year at Participant Inc. NYC and ICA-LA. Athey is a 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures” grant recipient, for The Asclepeion, a live art installation. April 19 Athey is facilitating Darkness Visible, a weeklong immersive 30 person performance workshop at Communitism in Athens, Greece, and has collaborated with Carmina Escobar on her sound recording concept, Vox Claimants, a non-lingual vocal duet filmed inside and out locations in California high desert locations. This is the second “plus-one” episode of Five Places Los Angeles. In each episode, we ask our interviewee to name someone whom they would choose to ask about the five places that define Los Angeles for them. As each interviewee invites a plus-one, our living documentary of the city grows and evolves. Author and artist Lisa Teasley, whom we interviewed in Episode Five, chose Ron Athey as her plus-one. To hear Lisa Teasley’s interview and read her bio, see E05.

Laurie Lipton was born in New York in 1953 and began drawing at the age of four. Lipton was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and has recently moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. She currently resides in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA. Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. "It's an insane way to draw", she says, "but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size. You can’t really experience the impact of the detail & intensity of one of my larger pieces on a computer screen. They have to be seen in the flesh.”

Frances Anderton covers Los Angeles design and architecture in print, broadcast media and public events. She is the author of the book “Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles,” published in 2022 by Angel City Press. Also in 2022, she co-produced 40 Years of Building Community, a short film about the influential affordable housing developer Community Corp of Santa Monica; and she co-organized Art for Earth’s Sake, a series at MOCA about the art world and its environmental footprint. For many years Anderton hosted KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture radio show, and produced Warren Olney’s current affairs shows Which Way, LA? And To The Point. Honors include the Esther McCoy Award, from the Architectural Guild of USC School of Architecture, for her work educating the public about architecture and urbanism.

This is the first “plus-one” episode of Five Places Los Angeles. In each episode, we ask our interviewees to name someone whom they would choose to ask about the five places that define Los Angeles for them. As each interviewee invites a plus-one, our living documentary of the city grows and evolves. Carolina Miranda, the arts and urban design columnist for the Los Angeles Times, whom we interviewed in Episode One, chose Carribean Fragoza as her plus-one. To hear Carolina Miranda’s interview and read her bio, check out her interview and show notes at fiveplaces.la.

Lisa Teasley is a writer and an artist, a graduate of UCLA and Los Angeles native. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, GLOW IN THE DARK, won numerous awards. Her novels HEAT SIGNATURE and DIVE have been praised in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her new story collection FLUID is forthcoming, September 2023. See more of Lisa's work at www.lisateasley.com. Lisa Teasley’s last solo retrospective exhibition, Paintrospective, was at the Marie Baldwin Gallery in Spring 2019; her last group show was LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s Every.Thing.Changes, Summer 2020. Lisa was a member of the former art collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN, who debuted the opera “Good Stock on the Dimension Floor” at the Whitney Biennial 2014. She was also the writer and host of the BBC Television documentary “High School Prom.” Lisa is an editor-at-large for Los Angeles Review of Books.

A short message from Five Places host Emmanuelle Bourlier, including an even shorter clip from Episode Three with Sam Lubell, executive editor of Metropolis magazine.

Natasha Case and her partner Freya Estreller founded Coolhaus ice cream in 2009 from a barely drivable postal van at the Coachella Music Festival, where the brand went viral. Coolhaus then scaled to a national fleet of trucks in LA and NYC, a flagship store in Culver City, and a national grocery business of ice cream products in stores ranging from Whole Foods to Sprouts to Kroger. Natasha led Coolhaus as CEO until its acquisition in 2021 by The Urgent Company, a family of brands focused on creating a more sustainable food system. Natasha has joined The Urgent Company as its new President of Brand Experience.

Sam Lubell is the Executive Editor of Metropolis Magazine. He has written more than ten books about architecture for Phaidon, Rizzoli, The Monacelli Press, Metropolis Books, and Oro Editions. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Wallpaper, Dwell, Wired, Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architect Magazine, and other publications. Lubell co-curated the exhibitions Never Built New York at the Queens Museum; Never Built Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; and Sacred Spaces, a traveling exhibition created with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture and Columbia University GSAPP.

There have always been amazingly talented women skateboarders but there's no denying that Vans Pro and Tony Hawk protégé, Lizzie Armanto, is one of the most groundbreaking ladies in skateboard history. Pouring sweat, skill, and creativity into full parts for both Thrasher Magazine and Birdhouse in 2017, she also became the first female to be featured on the cover of Transworld Skateboarding in addition to Thrasher cover honors. Armanto is also one of the leaders of a new onslaught of fierce women skaters making names for themselves in the Vans Park Series circuit. If that's not enough, she's also the first female skater to successfully complete Tony Hawk's 360 Loop, in addition to being featured as a primary character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 video game. With over 30 awards on her mantle, along with the first-ever Gold in X-Games Womens Park competition in 2013, Lizzie's path is paved in milestones and setting the tone for generations of women in skateboarding. (Bio via VANS.)

Carolina A. Miranda is the arts and urban design columnist for the Los Angeles Times where she covers art and architecture as well as broader cultural stories. Prior to this, she was a long-time independent journalist contributing stories to Time magazine, ARTnews, Fast Company, Architect, Art in America and National Public Radio. She is a regular contributor for KCRW’s “Press Play” and a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism. She served as founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild, The Times’ employee union. Find her on twitter @cmonstah and on instagram @cmonstah, and view her most recent LA Times articles here.

FIVE PLACES L.A. is a living documentary of the city. In each episode we ask one inhabitant of Los Angeles about the five places that define the city for them.