Join Laguna Art Museum and Grace Farms for an invigorating panel discussion with three of California’s top names in sustainable food, fashion and architecture: Camilla Marcus, Founder of West-Bourne; Shilpa Shah, Founder CEO of Cuyana; and Sharon Jonston, Partner at Johnston Marklee Architects.

What inspires an entrepreneur to become a changemaker? What does sustainability translate to in everyday language? What steps can we take to help create the world we wish to see? These are just some of the questions our panelists will tackle during this insightful and inspiring evening.

Advance tickets recommended.

Museum members: $20

Non-members: $30

Grace Farms is a center for culture and collaboration in New Canaan, Connecticut. Grace Farms brings together people across sectors at the SANAA-designed River building, situated on 80 acres of publicly accessible, preserved natural landscapes. Grace Farms’ humanitarian work to end modern slavery and foster more grace and peace in local and global communities includes leading the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced labor in the building materials supply chain.

Karen Kariuki Karen Kariuki is a Senior Program Manager at Grace Farms Foundation and has spent the last twenty years building a career in the philanthropic, not-for- profit, and private sectors – leading innovative solutions at the crossroads of the respective fields. Her broad-based experience and deep expertise have given her a passion for creating social impact, driving change, and delivering results.

Karen serves as Grace Farms Foundation’s first West-Coast based Program Officer to expand strategic partnerships and launch Grace Farms Foundation’s work more broadly.  In addition, she has led the Foundation’s work on fostering inclusive communities with a focus on gender and racial equality and food equity.

Karen obtained her MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Stanford University.

FOOD  Camilla Marcus, Founder of West-Bourne

Camilla is a chef, entrepreneur, activist, and mom of three dedicated to rethinking what it means to be a steward for our planet and future through the lens of food. Camilla’s pioneering hospitality business – west-bourne – was inspired by her California upbringing and began as the first mission-driven, zero-waste neighborhood restaurant in NYC. Since closing its doors in SoHo, west-bourne has expanded its mission of eating well and doing better into a collection of plant-based, zero-waste provisions for the home.

Camilla is committed to innovating across fields, from environmental activism to structural reform within the hospitality industry. She is a co-founder of ROAR (Restaurants Organizing Advocating Rebuilding), a founding member of the IRC (Independent Restaurant Coalition), and is committed to building a more equitable childcare system for working mothers.

Camilla has expanded west~bourne through partnerships such as Oishii, Ron Finley, and MAD Agriculture. Her chef star continues to rise in high demand, too, hosting events for brands like goop, Vogue, Revolve, Avaline, Perelel Health, and Tabayer, and hired by hosts like Aimee Song, Cameron Diaz, Tanya Taylor, and Whitney Port.

Camilla is an expert on sustainability and seeks to inspire a communal, considered approach to eating, gathering, and caring for the planet.

CLOTHING       Shilpa Shah, Founder CEO of Cuyana

Shilpa was drawn to Cuyana for the opportunity to enhance women’s lives by creating high quality products that were produced responsibly, priced accessibly, and that carried a story and a soul that could be delivered through human connection.

Beginning her career in Interaction Design, Shilpa has over 20 years of designing customer experiences, designing web and mobile interfaces for Fortune 500 companies such as Disney and AT&T. Before starting Cuyana, Shilpa added business expertise to her design and technical background by completing her MBA at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Today, Shilpa leads the company as its CXO, the Chief Experience Officer, crafting a branded omni-channel journey across digital and physical touchpoints.

SHELTER          Sharon Johnston, Partner at Johnston Marklee Architects

Sharon Johnston, FAIA, is a founding partner of Johnston Marklee, based in Los Angeles. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 50 major awards. In 2022, Johnston Marklee was recognized by the American Academy of Arts & Letters with the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and in 2023, the Johnston Marklee-designed Menil Drawing Institute was named a finalist by the Mies Hall Crown Americas Prize. A book on the work of the firm, entitled, HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. Monographs include: 2G N. 67, El Croquis N. 198, and A+U N. 614.

Sharon is Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; has taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles; and has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto. In 2019, Sharon was named Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture: New Generation Leader.

Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning fourteen countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include the new, permanent home for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) at Roy Lichtenstein Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village; the UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the design of the Dropbox global headquarters in San Francisco. Current projects include the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University; a renovation of the UCLA Reverend James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center in Los Angeles; and the interior architecture and museology within the Kunstmuseum Hauptbau in Basel Switzerland, in collaboration with Christ & Gantenbein.

From their earliest houses to the current arts and educational buildings, the firm’s work has established new precedents for fundamental architectural challenges and has advanced important historical types with site-specific buildings, which sustainably address local ecologies and embrace adaptive reuse, as central to their practice.

The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Together with partner Mark Lee, Sharon was the Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial