“I am not one and simple,” Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves, “but complex and many.”

I am motivated by connectedness. And as a twin, I’m attracted to exploring our relationships and gradients. I am attached to in-between. Between disciplines. Between people. Between inside and out. Between now and then. Temporary - permanent. Intellectual - emotional. Between offers a place to research and experiment. Between expands. Between brings us closer.

Trained in Architecture and Dance, I think through space choreographically. I create experiences rather than images, working with atmospheres and perception.

merica may, 2025

gray matters is a design collective based in New York City. Our work spans the fields of multi-media, performance, installation art, architecture, and urbanism. We are choreographers of social experience—framing bodies within materials to create meaning. With our different minds and diverse strengths, we ask deep questions and take a firm stance to tell resonant stories. As why-askers and yea-sayers, we blend either/or to embrace both/and.

Our recent projects engaging the housing, community, gender, data, reuse, climate, and race have offered us opportunities to hone our design process and envision an elevated future. Our extensive experience in cultural, residential, and media developments give us the expertise to see our visions into reality.

gray_matter(s) founding creative director is Merica May Jensen. The studio and is licensed to practice architecture in New York State, In 2022 it expanded beyond the OBJ monogram and became a certified WBE.

Current Core Collaborators:

Merica May is dedicated to her studio practice, research, teaching, and community. Building on her first career as a ballet dancer, she is interested in bodies, time, movement and the power of architecture as a social agent.
Merica May gained her architecture experience during a decade at the multi-disciplinary studio Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R). There she led and helped build a range of cultural and institutional projects, including the 250’ sculptural Park Union Pedestrian Bridge in Colorado Springs, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the top-floor event space at the Shed in New York City and the winning competition entry for the Adelaide Contemporary in Australia.
She is committed to her community, serving on the boards of Citygroup (a city-activist-art-space that was recently awarded the ArchLeague Prize), the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, and Junior Boards of American Ballet Theatre and Kaatsbaan (a cultural arts center and artist residency space in upstate New York). She is a steward in 6BC and La Plaza Cultural community gardens and teaches architecture at the City College of New York and the Pratt Institute. She is a licensed Architect in New York State.
Christine Lane is an award-winning advertising leader known for making brands tangible through experiences. She launched the first practices dedicated to behavior branding at both DDB Worldwide and McCann NY, helping brands shift from being platforms of assertion to pinnacles of authenticity.
For Lane, unifying brand expression with brand experience, in ways that authentically offer value to consumers, has been central to her 15+ year career. She is noted for transforming GE’s domestic marketing campaign into a digital-industrial training program for entrepreneurs in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and for turning a local office into one of the most awarded agencies in the world with work that includes the highly decorated “Fearless Girl”.
Lane is passionate about demonstrating brand purpose through innovative approaches to brand building, and delivering transformative marketing solutions while fostering mutually beneficial community-corporate partnerships.
She is a Future Council board member for Effie Worldwide and a member of the 4A’s CX Council. She judges the industry’s top work, is an advisor to New York’s EDC initiative, Women.NYC, and a mentor to future female leaders in advertising. In 2018, she was named to Adweek’s Creative 100, a list of gifted professionals who inspire current and future generations with their work and their passion for creativity.
When she’s not at her desk, you can often find her crossing another national park off her bucket list.
Soerynn Kim is a licensed architect with a wide range of international experience working on civic buildings.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, Soerynn began her career at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, designing the base building and public spaces of New York's One World Trade Center. Her extensive research, focused on the optical properties of architectural materials, helped develop its bespoke external-inner cladding systems.
At Diller Scofidio and Renfro, she was an Associate and a Senior Architect for the Shed, a movable art and performance space, seeing it to completion through stages of design and construction. Afterwards, she took on the role of lead designer and project manager for Microsoft's multi-programmed workplace center, a complex and fast-paced project for its tech campus in the Seattle region. Prior to DS+R, Soerynn worked with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano at his Paris and Genoa workshops, gaining significant experience practicing in Europe.
She teaches courses in architecture and design at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.
Travis Fitch is a New York-based architect, artist, designer, and educator. His work explores the intersection of spatial design, traditional craft, computational geometry, and 3D printing technologies.
His designs have been exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MFA Boston, and Mana Contemporary, and reside in the special collection of The University of Manchester. Collaborations with threeAsfour and Kaimin have appeared in NYFW and received press coverage in Vogue, Dezeen, and more. He has consulted on projects for Stratasys, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lotus, Chanel and Balenciaga.
Travis earned a B.Arch at Cornell University before joining Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and has since independently overseen multiple residential and commercial projects. In 2017 he launched Superpattern, a collection of intricately structured lighting and jewelry. He is a founding professor in the Parsons Textiles MFA program and served as a juror for the 2022 Cooper Hewitt Design Awards. In 2020 he received a research grant from the Center for Craft, and the resulting work was featured in the 2022 showcase Material Reasoning.
He was raised outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Bo Liu is an licensed Architect from Toronto with over 10 years of experience focused primarily on the public realm; spanning museums, schools, and community centers, whilst addressing uncertain futures with climate change and shifting urban needs.
She joined Gray Matters in 2024 supporting the Thornton Arts Center feasibility development among other projects.
During her tenure at DS+R, as a Senior Associate, she designed for several large scale institutional projects such as the Centre for Civilizations, Cultures, and Cities at the University of Toronto, a museum extension and retrofit for the V&A Storehouse in London, and 15 Hudson Yards in New York, for which she developed parametric tools to design and optimize a cold warped facade, and has helped win the urban planning competition for a new eco-island in Hainan, China. She is currently leading a new 300-seat Jazz Performance Hall and Community center for the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance in the heart of East Harlem.
Bo is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and is also a frequent guest critic at UC Berkeley, Pratt, McGill and the University of Toronto.
As a staunch advocate for diversity in the profession and the built environment, she founded the Diversity Task Force within DS+R to tackle systemic inequities in the architecture. In addition, she previously served as the Recruitment director at DS+R and currently manages mentorship liaisons with local and national level university partners such as FAMU, City College, City tech Brooklyn, and NJIT. She currently volunteers for the Chinatown Business Improvement District to provide pro-bono design services for businesses in need, and is an attending Fellow to for the Urban Design Forum to help reimagine and improve upon NYC's evolving built infrastructure.

gray_matter(s) is an open collective under the direction of founder Merica May Jensen with a constellation of partnerships and collaborators including:
obj, is a 12+ year collaboration between Yushiro Okamoto, Ryan Botts and Merica May Jensen. Working together at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), they took projects — ranging from cultural and institutional projects like the award-winning US Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the Shed, and MoMA, to residential homes — from concept to construction. Together as obj, they won NYC’s Small Lots Competition and were a finalist for Atlanta’s Legacy Makers Memorial.
other past + current collaborators - Paul Laroque, Bo Liu, Soerynn Kim, Christine Lane, Angie Widjaja, Weilin Berkey, Andrea Solk, Alice Colverd, Thomas de Monchaux, Patrick Di Rito, Alyssa Lewis, Sophie Pennetier, Shota Vashakmadze, Emily Martin, Alessa Rogers, Travis Fitch, Cassandra Trenary, Lindsay Kunz, Andy Kim, Massi Surratt, Keshav Ramaswami, Matthias Peltz, Olen Snow, Mike Robitz, Alice Chai, Andrew Beck, Lot-ek, Zach Mulitauaopele, Helena Urdaneta, Onyi Egbochue, Michelle Shin, Alexsa Ortiz-Reyes, Kuki, Jorge Ramirez-Escudero, Leeland McPhail, Kim Wadelton, Theodore Ullrich, Rui An, and WenJun Song.

Clients:

City of Thornton, City of Atlanta, Georgia Institute of Technology, Kaatsbaan Cultural Arts Center, American Ballet Theater, SAS Analytics - Times Square + NY Stock Exchange, Lockheed Martin, Fujifilm | Instax, Formula 1 | Redbull, Bellagio Hotel, Savaggi Arts Center

Our Advisors:

Ebbie Wisecarver is WeWork’s Chief Design Officer, responsible for leading the physical product's creative direction, strategy, and development. This includes overseeing revenue-generating add-ons within the physical product and overseeing the company-wide capex budget. Since joining the company in 2015, she has held multiple regional positions, including Japan, China, Australia, and India, along with global roles. Previously, Wisecarver held positions at prestigious design firms Diller, Scofidio + Renfro New York and Steven Holl Architects. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has participated in numerous traveling exhibitions and fellowships, including a competitive summer internship at Takenaka Corporation in Osaka, Japan. A strong advocate for gender equality, Wisecarver currently serves as the executive sponsor of the company's employee resource group, Women of WeWork, and is on the board of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which focuses on gender equity in the design and construction industries through research and education.
Charles Berman is an Associate Principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He attended Arizona State University and received a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been practicing architecture for over 30 years. Berman is a senior member of the design team of The Shed (7,400-18,500 sqm), a new center for artistic invention in Hudson Yards. As the Senior Technical Director on the project, he led The Shed development including the façade and the resolution of many of The Shed’s complex technical systems. Berman specializes in façade design and has worked as a façade consultant at Front, Inc. and R.A. Heintges & Associates. Prior to that, he spent 9 years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, where he led the design for the new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing, the new headquarters for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Berman received a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science in Design from Arizona State University. Berman teaches a technical elective on building envelopes at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
Alyssa Lewis is a design architect at Robert A. M. Stern Architects. She is a first-generation immigrant who attended New York City College of Technology and received a Master of Architecture from the Bernard and Ann Spitzer School of Architecture.
With ten years in the architecture field, she has worked with the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures on research funded by JP Morgan Chase that conducted urban data analysis which utilized air rights, unused FAR, for potential reparative development in Harlem. She worked with Columbia University and CAPA Heat Watch on the collection of environmental data for the development of heat maps of New York City, finding heat related vulnerabilities in neighborhoods as a result of climate change. She facilitated a partnership between East New York Restoration LDC, Department of Design, and Construction’s STEAM, where she developed a ‘Green Champions’ Renewable energy course, educating high school students throughout New York City on the growing green industry, and exposing them to alternative career paths and possibilities. Alyssa was a Graduate Researcher for the Research Foundation of The City University of New York, where she created the graphic standard for visualizations of the energy systems within buildings using 2D and 3D software. She worked as an Energy Code Analyst for the NYC Department of Buildings, where she documented alterations between the previous and upcoming energy codes that hope to reduce the emissions by the city’s largest buildings forty percent by 2030. In her capacity as a designer Alyssa worked for Diller Scofidio + Renfro on a mixed-use adaptive reuse project in Paris. Now at RAMSA, Alyssa specializes in interior and exterior luxury architectural projects with a focus on adaptive reuse, mixed use/ residential, and houses.
Suhee Oh is a licensed architect who brings extensive experience in commercial and civic-scale projects.
Suhee's notable projects include the Washington D.C. Union Station Master Plan, an $8.8 billion redevelopment plan for a multimodal transportation hub and a destination for shopping, dining, art, and entertainment. She also led the Redevelopment of Fordham Plaza in the Bronx, an urban design transforming an existing Metro North train station plaza into a vibrant civic destination with retail and a farmers market. In both cases, Suhee played a key role at Grimshaw Architects.
Suhee is passionate about leveraging technology to improve the built environment. She has successfully implemented design standards and processes by incorporating innovative design and construction technology at two hyper-growing Real Estate startups, namely WeWork and CloudKitchens.
Suhee holds a Master of Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology.