Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are architects, artists, and cofounders of Dream the Combine. Their partnership negotiates many binaries: black/white, male/female, foreigner/citizen. Much of their work is about bridging this gap in understanding — exploring the collision of multiple identities and contexts through installations in public space.

Dream the Combine’s site-specific installations are perceptual frameworks for vision and movement that aim to complicate the relationship between body, space, and image. They create social infrastructures — often out of materials linked to industrial processes — as platforms for visceral experiences that bring people together. Dream the Combine uses techniques of recombination and juxtaposition to work productively with difference.

Newsom and Carruthers have received numerous awards for their work, including a 2021 McKnight Fellowship for visualists, the 2020–21 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1, the 2018 Art Omi: Architecture residency, and the 2017 FSP/Jerome Fellowship. Dream the Combine is also part of the curatorial ensemble for the 2023 Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis, Missouri.

Dream the Combine’s work has been published widely, appearing in Metropolis, Architect, Log, Architectural Record, Wallpaper*, and Curbed, among many other outlets. Both Newsom and Carruthers are graduates of the Yale School of Architecture and are faculty at Cornell AAP.