Karen Stone, Design Team Chen Chen and Kai Williams Receive 2021 Rowena Reed Kostellow Award

Karen Stone, MID ’94

Karen Stone is a great designer, teacher, and supporter of the Rowena Fund. Karen's passion for experimenting with spatial relationships and objects in space developed at an early age with formal training in music and music performance. Karen is Director of Design for Knoll, Inc. Her award-winning work has been cited in publications including ID, Domus, Interiors, and Inside Design Now. She has created a new line of products for Knoll Shop retail store and established the Knoll Design Student Internship program.

An Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, Karen has been a guest teacher at Bauhaus Universitat-Weimar and Tsinghua University, Beijing. She serves as Pratt Faculty Advisor to the IDSA Student Chapter and leads design workshops at New York City high schools. She holds a BS in Industrial Design from Ohio State University, an MID from Pratt Institute, and has studied at Oxford University.

Young Designer Award: Chen Chen, BID ’07 and Kai Williams, BID ’06

Our young Rowena Award goes to the team of Chen Chen and Kai Williams. They met while attending Pratt Institute and founded their company in New York City in 2011. The studio creates a wide range of products from hand made one-off and limited production collectible works to manufacturing specialty home goods carried by retailers around the world. Whatever the method, an overarching sensitivity to materials, production processes and beauty carries through every object.