Critic and Editor Cathleen McGuigan to Speak at Fay Jones School 2024 Spring Commencement

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Cathleen McGuigan, former editor in chief of Architectural Record, will deliver the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design's 2024 Spring Commencement address on May 11.

Cathleen McGuigan, former editor in chief of Architectural Record, will deliver the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design's 2024 Spring Commencement address.

Commencement for the school's class of 2024 will take place at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, May 11, in Barnhill Arena on the U of A campus.

McGuigan was the editor in chief of Architectural Record from 2011 to 2022. Under her leadership, the magazine won numerous editorial awards, including the 2012 Grand Neal Award, the top honor for business-to-business publications. She began her journalism career at Newsweek, where she rose to become the architecture critic and the arts editor. In addition to Newsweek and Architectural Record, her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian and Rolling Stone, among other periodicals.

McGuigan received a bachelor's degree from Brown University and spent a year at Harvard's Graduate School of Design as a Loeb Fellow.

She has been honored as a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, as well as by the New York Professional Women in Construction and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. She sits on the Board of Trustees of the Skyscraper Museum in New York.  

She is currently working on independent editorial projects, including a biography of the critic Aline Saarinen. 

More details about the 2024 Spring Commencement, as well as live streaming and parking information, can be found on the Fay Jones School website.