bio

When do you first remember being creative, and what first drew you to it?

I was an artist before I was anything else. But it became real in two moments. My father was a missionary, and he took me with him, so by twelve I had been to South Africa and Kenya. What struck me was not that the people were different, it was that they lived in space differently, that a room or a street could hold an entire way of being. Then in tenth grade I spent three weeks at an architecture camp at the University of Maryland, building models with my hands, and I found art in it. I was a curious kid, honestly a little insubordinate, always asking why a thing was the way it was. Design was the first place that question had somewhere to go. It let me take what I felt about people and place and make something you could walk into.

How did you pick your medium?

I didn’t pick one, and that refusal is the medium. I started in interior design at Howard, then earned a dual master’s in architecture and lighting at Parsons. I was the first Black student to finish that program, and it trained me to read a space at every scale at once, from the structure to the light to the pillow. I call myself an interdisciplinary designer because architecture alone won’t say it and interior design alone won’t either. Lighting is the connective tissue. It is the quietest part of a room and the one that tells you how to feel, who a space is for, and whether you belong in it. Anyone can design a space. It takes more to build an experience, and the experience is what people carry long after they have forgotten the floor plan.

Who do you look up to?

My first models of what was possible were at my own dinner table. My mother built her success from nothing, and watching her taught me that a practice is something you make with your hands and your nerve. My father, a doctor and a missionary, showed me that work can be in service of people you may never see again. In the profession, Andy Bernheimer mattered early. While I was working for him I was honest that I wanted to start Drummond Projects, and instead of protecting his own interest he said,“Jimmie, go for it.” I carry that. More broadly, I look up to the Black designers who came before me in a field where we are still less than two percent of registered architects. They made room where there wasn’t any. My job is to widen it.

What questions or ideas are you most interested in exploring right now?

Who gets the authority to design their own space? For most of history, people of color have been handed rooms they had no hand in making. That question drives almost everything I am working on now. I want to prove that affordable housing deserves the same rigor as a fine dining room, not less, because design matters most exactly where it has been withheld. Right now that means more than two thousand affordable and workforce housing units across the region and cultural anchors like the Sanaa Center in West Baltimore with its 350-seat theater. I am also thinking about lighting as identity, and about how new tools, including AI, can help us hold a client’s cultural vision with more precision. Underneath all of it is one measure: are we designing seven generations forward, for communities that will still be thriving long after we are gone?

How has your practice evolved over the years?

It started as one person willing to both design a project and build it. Design-build was not a business strategy at first, it was the only way to protect an idea from the drawing to the installation. When the pandemic sent me back to DC, the studio began to grow in earnest, from a handful of us to a team now carrying around forty active projects, with an average age near thirty. The work widened too, from restaurants into schools, housing, and cultural spaces. What changes as you scale is that talent stops being enough. You have to build the systems that let a small studio produce large-studio quality without losing the soul of the thing. So a real part of my job now is entrepreneurial: hiring with intention, writing our standards down, building the infrastructure so the next designer who walks in can do the best work of their life. Growth is only worth it if the quality and the values scale with it.

What are you currently working on or thinking about next?

Several things at once, which is the nature of this studio. On the hospitality side, 1799
Prime with the Qaunder Family who is widely recognized as one of the oldest documented
African-American families in the United States. On the civic and cultural side, the Sanaa Center in West Baltimore and the Anacostia Arts Center, which will bring hundreds of homes back to a community that was displaced. Beyond any single project, I am building two things I care about deeply. One is an internal operating system for the studio, so our knowledge and standards live somewhere the whole team can reach, not in one person’s head. The other is longer in horizon: an archive of our work that can become an open resource for interdisciplinary design, so a developer or a community that could build on ourknowledge. I want the practice to outlast me, and to leave legacy behind, not only buildings.

Is there anyone you would like to thank?

My first models of what was possible were at my parents, first, for the curiosity and the work ethic. Howard, for teaching me to play big and for the lesson that when we show up for each other the whole village gets stronger. My mentors and community who opened doors and then told me to walk through on my own. My team, who are young and gifted and trusted me with their early careers. And our clients, who became our friends and let us treat their spaces like our own home.

Why does any of this matter beyond the buildings?

Because in a city powered by Black excellence, by women, by small-business owners and people of real influence, that identity still is not reflected in the spaces we move through every day. I think of the work as building infrastructure for cultural resilience, rooms and streets where people recognize themselves. And I would like to say one thing to the young Black entrepreneurs reading this: your voice needs to be heard, and knowing that is different from acting on it.. The AEC industry will not ask you to speak. Say it anyway.