Architect, activist and theorist Dr. Craig L. Wilkins serves on the faculty of the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The former director of the Detroit Community Design Center and hip hop architectural theorist is recognized as one of the country's leading scholars on the African American experience in the field of architecture. Recipient of the 2008 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture's Collaborative Practice Award, Dr. Wilkins is also the author of The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture and Music (University of Minnesota, 2007), which was awarded the 2008 Montaigne Medal for Best New Writing, the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award in the Social Change category and was a finalist in the Education/Academic category. In 2010, he was named a Kresge Artist Fellow.Dr.

Wilkins' practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes. Currently, his work focuses on what he describes as urban acupunctures; small architectures that relieve the pressures of everyday life, often built with salvaged and repurposed materials in the city's neglected spaces. These small architectures ultimately illustrate what he calls "the aesthetics of making-do" and parallels the still-evolving principles of the nascent hip hop architecture movement - reusing discard objects, using materials for unintended purposes, rewriting former definitions of the good, the useful and the beautiful in space and place, inviting users to create their own environment. His design and literary work has been shown both nationally and internationally, appearing in such media as the Journal of Architectural Education, the International Review of African American Art, The Architect's Newspaper, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Detroit News, Miami Herald, Atlantic Cities, and Fast Company, and exhibited at the Museum of Outstanding Design in Como, Italy. Most recently, his work on transit stops in Detroit received an A' Design and International Competition Silver Award for Social Design in 2014.Dr. Wilkins received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts; his masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and his bachelors from the University of Detroit School of Architecture.