The World Around Summit is a conference featuring luminaries from architecture, design, and beyond online and in-person at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This event, like all of The World Around’s programs, is driven by the urgency of the climate crisis and a mission to make architecture and design issues accessible. The Summit functions as a core sample of the built and environmental design fields, showcasing innovative and forward-thinking ideas alongside newly commissioned time-based works relating to the conference’s themes. Given the event’s date on Earth Day, themes focus on ecological justice and related inquiries, such as abolitionism, rematriation of land, community-driven design, and more. The Summit seeks to answer the following questions: How does the design and architecture industry provide ideas, infrastructure, and visibility for the stories and forces that shape the lives of millions? What does ecological redemption look like?

Beatrice Galilee, executive director of The World Around (TWA), is a curator, critic, and cultural consultant specializing in the field of contemporary architecture and design who oversees TWA’s artistic program and leads all organizational strategy. Galilee is internationally recognized for her worldwide experience in curating, designing, and conceiving original and dynamic city-wide biennales, museum exhibitions, installations, conferences, events, and publications, bringing together the world’s most important institutions with cutting edge practitioners. Prior to founding TWA, she was the first curator of contemporary architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she organized exhibitions and installations on the Met Rooftop, and public programs of contemporary architecture, art, photography, film, and design, launched In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, as well as acquisitions and collections research from 2014–19.

Satomi Blair has overseen all The World Around Summits and In Focus events and serves as executive producer for the 2024 iteration. Blair is an actor, producer, and founder of 4Hawk Productions, an award-winning independent documentary production company committed to telling diverse stories of creative artists, makers, and activists. Blair produces all videos for TWA’s events and global platform. Films under Blair’s creative leadership have been a part of Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC, Anchorage International Film Festival (Jury Award Winner), Miami Short Film Festival (Winner- Best Documentary Film), Houston Cinema Arts Society/NASA CineSpace (Finalist), DocuWest, Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, Miami International Science Film Festival (Winner- Best Micro-Doc). She is an alumna of The Women’s Media Center; Progressive Women's Voices, and proud member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and AEA.

Founded in 2020, The World Around (TWA) is a global nonprofit platform headquartered in New York, with a simple but ambitious mission: to rethink architecture. Taking the most critical issue of our time—the climate crisis—as the lens to view all of their activities, TWA connects with global institutions to craft unique public conversations that look beyond buildings to investigate the often-invisible forces that shape our homes, cities, landscapes, and lives.