Blair Kamin
On August 10th, the Urban Communication Foundation will honor Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, the 2012 winner of UCF’s Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award, at the annual Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in Chicago. Mr. Kamin will be featured in a panel discussion – “Who Speaks for Cities, How Do Cities Speak to Us?” – as part of the AEJMC’s 100th anniversary event.
Blair Kamin won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1999, for a body of work highlighted by a series of articles that explored the “problems and promise of Chicago’s greatest public space, its lakefront.” A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, he graduated from Amherst College in 1979 and from the Yale University School of Architecture in 1984 with a Master of Environmental Design. He was a reporter for the Des Moines Register from 1984 to 1987, then joined the Tribune in 1987, covering suburban and cultural news. Since becoming the Tribune’s architecture critic in 1992, he has written about “the full range of the built environment.” Kamin has lectured widely, and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs about architecture, including National Public Radio, the History Channel, and ABC’s Nightline. Among his many awards are the George Polk Award for criticism, the American Institute of Architects’ Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement and the Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism, which he has won 13 times.