Trudy Watt, Founder and Principal

After graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Watt earned her M.Arch at Princeton University in 2013 and started the Waxwood Investigative Group in Philadelphia in 2016. As the Founder and Principal of Waxwood, she researches, organizes knowledge, and builds teams around complex art and design projects that cultivate compassion, increase empathetic listening, and widen channels of communication for shared wisdom among groups of people.

In 2016, Watt became the first resident architectural designer within a research unit (MEDstudio@JEFF, Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Thomas Jefferson University’s nearly 200 year history. Soon thereafter, she became the first Fellow in Emergent Design + Creative Technology in Architecture + Medicine and Co-Director of Research, working in collaboration with the MEDstudio@JEFF team, to advance the mission of the organization, develop and manage programming and public installations and further the research of MEDstudio@JEFF around an emerging discipline between architecture and medical science.

Watt’s work has been exhibited in Chicago, Princeton, Marfa, Athens, Philadelphia and New York and she has taught at Princeton, Columbia and Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson University + Philadelphia University) Universities.