Sheila Kennedy co-presented in the workshop “Reduce CO2 – With technology to zero emissions” at the 3rd Holcim Forum 2010 “Re-inventing Construction” in Mexico City and was a member of the Holcim Foundation Awards 2011 jury for North America.

She won a Holcim Foundation Awards 2014 Acknowledgement prize for “Chrysanthemum Building: Affordable residential urban infill development, Boston, USA” which offers a viable solution to the “housing question” – promoting an affordable model for residential development in a dense urban neighborhood. She won a Holcim Foundation Awards 2017 Bronze for “Global Flora: Net-zero greenhouse for Wellesley College, Boston, USA” – a re-imagination of the greenhouse as a locally-sourced, low-energy building linking Wellesley College to the local community of Wellesley in Massachusetts, USA.

At Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA), Sheila Kennedy brings 20 years of professional experience in architectural design. She consults on all design projects, and directs Matx, KVA’s material research division that works with business leaders, cultural institutions, and public agencies to design new applications for renewable materials and resilient ‘soft’ infrastructure for networked cities and urbanizing regions.

Her design work has been widely published and has been exhibited at the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the International Rotterdam Biennial, the Vitra Design Museum, and the TED conference in California.

Her research is focused on design for emergent distributed energy paradigms in buildings, cities and developing global regions; the visualization of active material networks; and the creation of design applications, integration pathways and manufacturing processes for flexible, mobile and embedded technologies in materials, objects and architecture.

She studied architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and received a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design (GSD) (1985).

Sheila Kennedy held positions at GSD and at the University of Michigan before establishing MATx, a pioneering materials research unit at KVA to engage applied creative production across the fields of electronics, architecture, design and material science in 2000. MATx explores how design can leverage the formal, aesthetic and technical properties of nanomaterials to accelerate their entry into the building industry and meet the needs of different cultures around the world.