Emily Pilloton-Lam

Emily Pilloton-Lam is an architectural designer, builder, educator, and Founder/Executive Director of the nonprofit Girls Garage. For the past 15 years, Pilloton-Lam has taught and worked alongside youth ages 9-18 to co-design and build public architecture projects including a farmers market pavilion, tiny homes for the unhoused, a school library, a public bus stop, urban farm structures, and more. She believes that by giving young girls and gender-expansive youth the physical and personal tools needed to build the world they want to see, we can change the authorship of our built environments and upend power structures within our communities.

As an architectural designer, Pilloton-Lam’s design process combines community-based design principles with social justice tenets, restorative justice, and participatory practice to build physical spaces that represent the narratives of those who built and will inhabit them. Her educational work combines technical STEM and trade skills with mentorship and support for the whole student that honors and amplifies their identities. Pilloton-Lam also works with educators and schools to reinvent learning through personalized and often politically engaged project-based learning.

Pilloton-Lam holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley, and a Master of Fine Arts in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held academic positions as a Lecturer in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley, Stanford University’s Department of Architectural Design, and as a Visiting Professor at UC Davis, and is the author of three books, "Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People," "Tell Them I Built This: Transforming Schools, Communities, and Lives With Design-Based Education," and "Girls Garage: How To Use Any Tool, Tackle Any Project, and Build The World You Want To See." Her work was the subject of the full-length documentary If You Build It, about her Studio H students’ farmers market project in rural North Carolina.

She has presented her work on the TED Stage and to the Obama Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and has been featured on The Today Show, The Colbert Report, Forbes, and CNN. A power tool lover and hardware nerd at heart, Pilloton-Lam lives with her family, human and canine, in Berkeley, California.