Kelly Bair is Partner at BairBalliet, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture. Bair has also taught in Los Angeles at UCLA and SCI-Arc and has held Visiting Professor appointments at University of Toronto, City College of New York and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She brings over two decades of experience in the architectural profession at firms such as Pugh+Scarpa, Greg Lynn Form, and Gnuform. Bair holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design from University of Colorado (B.Envd) and a Master’s degree (M.Arch) from the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. 

BairBalliet is a design partnership invested in architecture in the form of both speculative and built projects. Based in Chicago (Kelly Bair) and Los Angeles (Kristy Balliet), BairBalliet choreographs the conceptual, material and technical aspects of architecture at multiple scales and through various mediums including texts, objects, film, exhibitions, buildings and urban interventions. BairBalliet’s design philosophy leverages architecture’s disciplinary history against the cultural and environmental instability of the present towards architectural proposals that are both project and position.

BairBalliet's work has been exhibited internationally in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Frac Centre and Centre de design de l’UQAM. Their work has been exhibited in the United States at Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), The Architecture & Design Museum in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Carnegie Museum of Art among others. BairBalliet has been widely published in architecture journals such as Art Papers, Fresh Meat, Log Journal, Room One Thousand, Pool, and Architect's Newspaper.

BairBalliet are also co-founders of Possible Mediums, a curatorial project and co-edited book (Actar, 2018) featuring fellow designers and educators interested in shaking up the context and format in which architecture is taught, produced, and engaged.