Danny Forster is an architect, speaker, TV host and producer, and an expert on design and the built environment. As principal of Danny Forster & Architecture, Danny directs projects whose ingenuity and scope push the industry toward a smarter future, from building the world’s tallest modular hotel in New York City to partnering with Berkshire Hathaway company MiTek Inc. to create a transformative nationwide modular construction platform.

Danny’s television projects, including Build It Bigger, which he hosted for five seasons, and the Emmy Award-winning Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, which he co-produced with Steven Spielberg, explore how buildings relate to and express people, culture, and history. Given his talent for explicating design concepts and changing the way people think about architecture, Danny is a sought-after professor and public speaker around the world, at global construction conferences, graduate courses at Harvard University, TED talks, and beyond.

Sharmila Chaudhuri oversees every interior design project at DF&A, as well as helping steer the direction of the firm’s current approach and future work. She has a simple design philosophy, honed during more than two decades of experience as an architect, interior designer, construction manager, and thought leader: “Homes should be versatile, flexible, and functional — yet always warm, calming, and inviting.” 

Born and educated in the United Kingdom, Sharmila has worked extensively in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In addition to designing high-end luxury private homes around the world, she has worked on marquis global hospitality projects such as the Waldorf Astoria in New York and the Yas Hotel at the Formula One racetrack in Abu Dhabi. 

She brings this expertise, a fine-tuned spatial awareness, and a deep understanding of luxury materiality to more affordable projects as well, as Director of Design at WeLive and Nabr, and in her modular hospitality projects for Danny Forster & Architecture. She is adept at creating a sense of hand-crafted luxury, even at a mass scale. It’s a question, she says, of determining where your interior design dollars can have the greatest impact.

Jason Buchheit came to DF&A with a particular interest in fabrication and systematization, and during his tenure has led the firm’s growing focus on design for manufacturing strategies and processes. Thinking about construction from a manufacturing perspective leads to design with less material waste, under more controlled and safer work conditions, using a tighter integration of systems–and ultimately to more sustainable and higher performing buildings. This approach has affected almost all of DF&A’s projects, from interior renovations with custom fabrication elements to large-scale volumetric architecture to research and development into off-site construction systems with major corporate collaborators like MiTek. 

Jason is a Registered Architect in New York, California, and Florida, with 30 years of professional experience, including in cultural, education, hospitality, multifamily and single family residential projects from concept through to completion. Highlights include 842 6th ave, 570 Market Street, and MiTek Modular, and, before DF&A, the Museum of Modern Art, Lehman College Child Care Center, NYC Post-Sandy Prefab Beach Structures, and Global Building Modules product system research and development, all of which involve significant off-site fabricated elements that require detailed technical solutions. He has also served as director of the New York City chapter of Architecture for Humanity and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute. He received his bachelor degree in architecture at Pennsylvania State University and his master’s in architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

“I like to think of myself as a hyper-pragmatist,” says Jason. “I take pragmatic thinking to such an extreme that it becomes radical.” Every operating premise should be able to withstand challenge, he says, and the answer to the question, “Why is it done that way?” has to be something better than “That’s the way it’s done.”

Kate Cohen has worked with Danny Forster & Architecture since its founding in 2007 to articulate its design philosophy and contextualize each of its projects. Scripts for film and television, talks for industry and general audiences, contest submissions, team bios–any time DF&A tells a story or makes an argument, she’s involved. 

Kate wrote the voiceover script for DF&A’s Emmy-Award-winning series Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, and the story and voiceover for the series How China Works, which earned two Golden Panda Awards. She is also a Washington Post columnist who writes about the intersection of culture, family, and politics, and she is the author of three books, most recently, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should, Too) (Godine, 2023). She has a degree in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. 

“Because I’m not a very spatial person, it’s always a bit of a challenge for me to visualize and describe the built environment,” says Kate. “So it’s never boring! And it means I’m always hunting for meaning: not just what does this look like, but what is it about?”

Jeff Stewart enjoys the balance of leadership and creativity that characterizes his role as project architect. While steering a project down the path from inception to completion, he also gets to contribute to it as a designer, a modular innovator, and a designer. He enjoys balancing big-picture thinking with detail work, as well. It’s one of the reasons he relishes modular design, where it’s essential to get involved in the details right from the very beginning of a project, and where those details, multiplied, become the building. 

Jeff’s notable DF&A projects include the 25-story Autograph Hotel tower at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Motto, the modular AC Nomad at 842 6th Avenue, and the modular tower on Market Street in San Francisco, as well as several high-end residential projects. He is lead designer of the Shinnecock resort development plan, and a member of the Mitek Modular Research team. Before joining DF&A, Jeff worked at Garrison Architects, where he contributed to award-winning projects included Piaule Catskill, Catskill NY (AIA Brooklyn 2022 Excellence Award), POD Hotel Brooklyn (an IFDA "Best in Show" BKLYN Designs), Lighthouse Point, Staten Island, NY (NYC Public Design Commission Award), and NYC Emergency Housing Prototype (AIA/NYS Design Merit Award). He earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture with Distinction from SUNY Buffalo and a Master of Architecture from Syracuse University, where he was awarded the Dean's Citation for Excellence in Thesis. 

Jeff keeps as his architectural watchwords two sayings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German-American architect: “God is in the details” and “Less is more.” He believes thoughtful small choices can add up to more than grand gestures—in fact, that a building can only be the sum of carefully crafted parts. That’s why the architects Jeff admires tend to be technical, material architects, who don’t try to cover up the tectonics of their buildings. “Good architecture is more about craft and execution than about creating beautiful shapes,” he says. “A beautiful shape means nothing if the materials don't come together right.”

Sonya Feinstein is an architect with a particular interest in design tools. An expert in BIM modeling and rendering software, she is leading the firm’s exploration of the uses of AI in architectural design. 

Sonya grew up in the New York City area, then earned her bachelor’s degree in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis before returning to NYC for her master’s degree in architecture from Pratt Institute. Her interest in physical model making—she describes herself as a “model nerd in architecture school”—led her to develop an expertise in BIM modeling and software. 

Before joining DF&A, Sonya worked on a variety of project types for Garrison Architects and at Mitchell Giurgola Architects, including modular residential and institutional research. Sonya is happy to report DF&A truly embraces the possibilities inherent in BIM. “Some practices are afraid to use modeling tools to their utmost,” she says, and that reticence hampers both their work and progress in architecture as a whole. With the leadership of firms that do welcome innovation and change, “The technology is going to make the field so much better,” she says, citing advances BIM is enabling in environmentally sensitive architectural design as one potential of this extraordinary technology—potential she plans to harness. “The thing that I know is important to me as a designer is the way we use tools.”

As Director of Operations, Alexandra Hartford works with Danny Forster to set strategic goals for DF&A and then ensures that every aspect of the firm is moving toward those goals. She oversees all departments of the firm including architecture, film, research, finance; manages relationships with all external partners and clients; and directs the business development and marketing strategies. 

Alex joined DF&A in March 2020, at a time when the “office” was more a notion than a place. With design skills she honed as a landscape architecture student and as an illustrator, management skills she developed in her previous work with design and architecture firms, and a personal skill she listed on her resume as “calmness under pressure,” she helped DF&A weather the pandemic and chart a course for its future. During her tenure, the firm has undertaken a multi-year project with the Shinnecock Nation and established a long-term research partnership with MiTek Industries. Alex has a Bachelor of Science degree in Landscape Architecture from University College Dublin.

Nishant Jacob grew up in Dubai and has gathered architecture experience from around the world. He started his career working for high profile architects in Japan and Chile before moving to New York to pursue his master’s degree at Columbia. 

Before joining DF&A, Nishant specialized in ground-up multifamily residential and led the design and project management of multiple projects in Brooklyn, New York, while working at Pliskin Architecture. He’s also worked in commercial, retail, and food and beverage; at Tacklebox Architecture, he led the design and construction of Miriam restaurant in the Upper West Side and was the lead designer for the multiple award-winning pop-up retail store for Claus Porto in Soho. At DF&A his initial focus is another facet of “how you can offer the service of architecture”: as a designer of high-end residential projects. 

Throughout his career, Nishant has been committed to teaching; “I’ve always had one foot in practice and one foot in academia.” He’s taught at Sarah Lawrence College and GSAPP, Columbia University, and has served as a visiting critic at both, as well as at NJIT and Parsons. Teaching informs his practice of architecture, says Nishant, prompting him to consider the relationships at the heart of the process, as well as “the value of the act of creativity in a constantly changing environment.”

Catie Curry is a born-and-raised New Yorker, with a passion for design—and for all things French. As a junior designer at DF&A, Catie helps shape and execute all manner of aesthetic decisions, in both physical and media spaces, creating 3D renderings, sourcing materials, art, and furnishings, designing custom millwork, and more. Outside the firm, she is a ceramicist with a pop-art sensibility and a strong sense of fun.

Catie earned a bachelor of arts in Architectural and Urban Design Studies at New York University, where she honed her entrepreneurial skills as Director of Marketing for the TAMID Club. Studying in France further contributed to her fluency in French and her sense of design.

Ceramics has paired well with her work at DF&A, says Catie. “With interior design, you’re mostly working digitally. If you’re lucky, you get to see that custom staircase in real life eventually, but it takes a long time. Ceramics gives me that immediate satisfaction of planning, making, and firing a piece, all within a week.”

Director of Finance Waverly Damato met Danny Forster in 2010, when she was primarily involved in film and TV production. Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, the Emmy-Award–winning series Danny co-executive produced with Steven Spielberg, was their first project together. She’s worked for DF&A ever since, managing the complex financing behind film projects, architecture projects, and research partnerships. She also collaborates on the firm’s larger financial direction, developing a road plan for the future through cost analyses and growth strategies.  

During the course of her career, Waverly has worked for Dan Rather’s production company, Jung Lee’s event design company Fête, and the People’s Choice Awards, to name a few.

At one point, Waverly’s career where she took a fork in the road: instead of the bureaucracy and monotony of corporate finance, she chose the hands-on, constantly changing challenge of managing creative start-ups and entrepreneurs. “My passion is helping a company I believe in realize its vision,” she says. How does she do that? By creating the conditions that allow everyone else to be creative. “My job is to think 12 steps down the road, so my colleagues can just think about the project in front of them.”

Lumi Doodle is a Mini Goldendoodle with a special interest in buildings that have “good bones.” As DF&A’s Chief Canine Consultant, she has many responsibilities within the firm, including but not limited to the procurement of belly rubs, QA/QC on human shoewear, and general office security. On weekends, she likes to relax by taking a ball and going into the other room.

Lumi earned her bachelor’s degree at Arfard College, and her master’s at Tail University’s School of Barkitecture, where she was editor-and-chief of the prestigious Paw Review. Additionally, she has spent a significant amount of time studying squirrels at the park.  

When asked for a quote, Lumi sniffed: her work stands for itself. Reminding us that one dog break equals seven human breaks, she insisted on attending to her duties instead of chatting. She did, however, agree to circle back. And she shook on it.

Chip the chihuahua is a tone-setter here at DF&A. As our Chief Barkitectural Officer, Chip takes a leading role on yapplications to important RFPs and helps our business development team sniff out new clients. Like Project Architect Jeff Stewart, Chip abides by Ludwig Miles van der Rohe’s famous words: “Dog is in the details.”

After earning a degree in urban studies and puppytry at UC-Barkeley, Chip eventually completed a Master of Architecture at Penn, which happens to be the name of his favorite tennis ball. In his free time he has been testing the structural integrity of squeaky toys and the speed at which a small canine projectile can zoom around the office.

Chip was moving too fast to give us a quote, but we did just hear a loud crash in the other room so we’re probably going to go check that out.