Fay Jones School Alumna Sloan Aulgur to Give 2026 Spring Commencement Address

Sloan Aulgur, an alumna of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, will return to the U of A campus to deliver the school's 2026 Spring Commencement address.

Commencement for the school's class of 2026 will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 9, in Barnhill Arena on the U of A campus.

Aulgur is a designer, researcher and playwright whose work explores the space between narrative and lived experience. Born and raised in Arkansas, she graduated from the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in 2020 with a Bachelor of Interior Design. Since then, her work has spanned art, interior design, architecture, exhibition and scenic design, treating interiors as performative sites for collective inquiry. She believes the most profound thing we do as human beings is gather in person to tell stories, grounding her practice as a designer. 

Following her undergraduate studies, Aulgur worked with practices across Northwest Arkansas, including Somewhere Studio, Blue Crane and Marlon Blackwell Architects. She went on to receive a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she served as a research and design lead at Matter Design, exploring how stories from the humanities past can inform future environments. This work developed her approach grounded in narrative, material histories and collective modes of reading and staging. 

Her recent work includes exhibition design for The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology, a collateral event of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale; and MIT Face to Face, a campus-wide drawing project inspired by Es Devlin. Her performance work, Green Herrings in a Yellow Room: A Counter-Production of The Yellow Wallpaper, debuted Off-Off Broadway at the Dream Up Festival in New York.

She is currently an architectural designer at Rockwell Group in New York, creating spaces between hospitality and performance, and continues to build a practice that makes underrepresented and underexplored conversations, places and stories accessible to broader publics. 

More details about the 2026 Spring Commencement, as well as live streaming and parking information, can be found on the Fay Jones School website.