Christopher Hawthorne

Christopher Hawthorne is the Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles, a position appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Prior to joining City Hall, Hawthorne was architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to early 2018. He is Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where since 2015 he has directed the Third Los Angeles Project, a series of public conversations about architecture, urban planning, mobility, and demographic change in Southern California. He has also taught at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. A frequent collaborator with KCET-TV, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, Hawthorne wrote and directed the hour-long documentary "That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles," which had its broadcast debut earlier this year, and received an L.A.-area Emmy Award as Executive Producer for the 2016 KCET program "Third L.A. with Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne." He has been a Mid-Career Fellow at Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program and a Resident in Criticism at the American Academy in Rome. Hawthorne grew up in Berkeley and holds a bachelor's from Yale College, where he studied political science and architectural history.