Cathryn Dwyre
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Cathryn Dwyre-Perry is Adjunct Associate Professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture and a faculty member at the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology at Industry City in Brooklyn. She received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in philosophy and geology from Colgate University.
Cathryn Dwyre-Perry is co-principal of pneumastudio, an experimental art, design and curatorial practice situated at the intersection of architecture and landscape. pneumastudio’s art and design work has been exhibited at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Design Museum of Barcelona, and New York University. Publishers that have featured pneumastudio’s art and design work include Routledge, Actar, Prestel, and Wiley-Academy. pneumastudio was also featured in The New York Times as part of a 2015 exhibition review.
Dwyre-Perry previously served as managing editor of ViaBooks and its volume Dirt (MIT Press). She is a recipient of the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, for which she completed a joint residency with Chris Perry, with whom she is also co-editor of a special issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press), co-curator of the exhibition Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural, and co-editor of a forthcoming book featuring work from the Ambiguous Territory exhibition and content from its affiliated symposium (Actar Publishers).
Dwyre-Perry is a member of the Board of Directors of Basilica Arts, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts center in Hudson, NY and a member of the Board of Directors of imby, a local social network and virtual community serving the Hudson Valley. She provides consulting services to startup teams and has served as a Responsible Leader (an invited position) of the BMW Foundation since 2001. Prior to her design and academic career, Dwyre-Perry spent over ten years in leadership of technology startup companies. Most recently, she was the V.P. of Corporate Development of GridApp Systems, where she also served as the Secretary to the Board of Directors and member of the Compensation Committee.
Dwyre-Perry was charged with operational and corporate development strategy, as well as recruitment to build the company to 40 employees, including a nine-person team in India. GridApp had over three million in sales in 2007, and the business grew by 20% in 2008 and 2009. The company was purchased by BMC Software in 2010. Prior to GridApp Systems, Dwyre-Perry was a key member of management in the startup Register.com. Between 1998 and 2002, she served as the Director of Human Resources. In this position, she was charged with growing the company from 15 employees in 1998 to over 450 employees in 2002 (including acquired companies). She used innovative and nonstandard methods of hiring, equity participation, and performance management, reporting directly to the CEO and founder. Dwyre-Perry also completed senior executive searches, managed the staffing of a new Nova Scotia facility, hiring 150 employees in a seven-month period, forging relationships with Canadian politicians and managing a business incentives kickback program. She was as a key force in growing the company from 900,000 in revenue to over $115 million in revenue.
Earlier in her career, Dwyre-Perry bought and sold rare books at Ursus Rare Books and also worked for the USGS (United States Geological Survey) doing field data collection for structural geologic mappings of the North Cascades in Washington.