Aluminaries is a series dedicated to the College’s most esteemed graduates, highlighting their lives, their accolades, and the artistic prowess they developed at Moore.
Meet our next group of Aluminaries below and follow us on social media @moorecollegeart to keep up with future entries!
Karen Daroff ’70
For more than 50 years, Karen Daroff has made a name for herself as a renowned business leader and pioneering creative in the interior design world. Her handiwork is interwoven throughout some of Philadelphia’s most iconic and historic sites, including the Loews Hotel, the Comcast Center and the Philadelphia International Airport. Daroff’s international work is just as impressive, seen in cities like Barcelona, Beijing and St. Thomas.
Just three years after graduating from Moore in 1970, Daroff founded her eponymous design firm Daroff Design Inc. Throughout her career, she built a list of esteemed clients, including Comcast, NBC Universal, Disney, Marriott, Sony, and MGM. She’s a recipient of the prestigious “Designer of the Year” award by Contract Magazine and the Pennsylvania Governor’s Top 50 Women in Business Award, among numerous other accolades.
Daroff estimates that she has trained or mentored more than 1,000 designers and architects. This year, she was honored as Moore’s Visionary Woman Awards winner, a testament to her legacy in the interior design world and beyond. You can read more about Karen Daroff in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Moore Magazine.
“Karen embodies the hallmarks of a visionary. She is innovative, endlessly entrepreneurial and determined like no other. As she set out on her career after graduating from Moore, Karen was clear-eyed about the road ahead. She knew that in order to succeed as a woman in the male-dominated world of art and design, she would have to blaze her own trail and tenaciously pursue her own seat at the table.”
—Karen Dougherty Buchholz, Executive Vice President of Administration and Chief Diversity Officer, Comcast Corporation and long-time friend of Karen Daroff
Polly Smith ‘71
Polly Smith is known for her work as a costume designer and inventor. In 1977, she worked with her friends Lisa Lindahl and Hinda Miller to design the first sports bra, and in 2022, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 1978, Smith began her career as a costume designer at the Jim Henson Company, outfitting some of The Muppet Show’s most iconic characters of all time, including Miss Piggy and Rizzo the Rat. She also designed for beloved children’s television series such as Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock, winning seven Emmy Awards for her work along with countless other nominations.
“The Muppets would never have looked as good as they did without Polly. Her innovation, creativity and ingenuity are second to none when it comes to design.”
—Abby Merrill ’73, former in-house illustrator for Sesame Street
Jill Bonovitz ‘74
Jill Bonovitz has been a pioneer of the Philadelphia arts community since 1974, when she and four other Moore alumni co-founded The Clay Studio. Since its founding, The Clay Studio has played an important role in promoting ceramic arts to students of all levels, artistic interest, proficiency and financial means. The Clay Studio has broadened ceramics as a contemporary art form and elevated the work of emerging artists nationally.
A world-renowned fine artist, Bonovitz’s work in both wire and ceramic arts has been included in public and private collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hermitage Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Racine Art Museum and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (now the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House). In 2019, she was honored at Moore for her contributions to the fine arts field as a Visionary Woman Awardee. Read more about Bonovitz and her work at The Clay Studio in Moore Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue.
“I didn’t really think about a career; I just thought about each next step. Moore was a wonderful place to get started. There were no boundaries, and anything was possible.”
—Jill Bonovitz ‘74
Janet Biggs ’81
Janet Biggs is a research-based interdisciplinary artist known for her immersive work in video, film and performance. She focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations, and her work has taken her from areas of conflict to as far as Mars (as a crew member at the Mars Desert Research Station and Mars Academy USA). She has worked with NOAA and NASA, and collaborated with high-energy nuclear physicists, neuroscientists, Arctic explorers and astrophysicists.
Biggs has had solo exhibitions and film screenings at Museos de Tenerife, Neuberger Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art and more. Her work has been supported by many prestigious organizations, including the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, she returned to Moore as a Visionary Woman Awards recipient.
“From the bigness of the Hadron Collider, the planet Mars, or the Arctic, to the smallness of a hummingbird or a human brain cell, the images and themes in Janet Biggs’ work shuttles us between the tenderness and complexity of human experience and the vastness of the theater within which experience itself unfolds. Her work chronicles our tenuous relationship to place, to life, and to each other with incredible richness, generosity and depth.”
—Rachel Hecker ‘80, Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Houston School of Art
Pat Ward Williams ‘82
Pat Ward Williams is best known as a photographer who plays with media to explore race, gender and history although her wider artistic practice includes video, 3D installation and public artwork. Only four years after graduating from Moore, her mixed-media work Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1986) made waves, using a combination of text and photography to delve into the relationship between violence and spectacle. In 1998, Williams was selected, based on her engagement in sociopolitical issues, as one of the Photo-Active Feminist Visiting Artists, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and Women’s Studies Program.
Over the scope of her career, Williams has received a Ford Foundation Grant, a California Community Foundation Fellowship and a Fulbright Regional Research Fellowship, among many others. Her work has been shown widely and she is an accomplished art educator, teaching photography at University of California Irvine, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Florida State University.
“Pat Ward Williams’ prescient, complex meditations on race, history, and representation, such as her landmark ‘Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock’ (1986), resonate with a particular urgency and relevance in today’s cultural climate. Her combination of photography, found materials, and text engages viewers in a perceptual tug of war between what they see, their own associations, the artist’s voice, and the weight of history.”
—Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, HuffPost
Judith Joy Ross ‘68
Judith Joy Ross is an acclaimed photographer widely known for her quiet and empathetic portrait photography celebrating the individual human experience. Ross discovered her fascination with photography when studying at Moore and began capturing images of the people around her using a large-format, 8x10-inch view camera that would become her signature.
In summer 2023, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted a retrospective exhibition featuring approximately 200 of Ross’ photographs from the 1970s through the 2010s. Ross’ work has been collected at many institutions internationally, and she has received a number of honors including a grant from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work continues to provoke conversation about what it means to be human and to encounter others.
“Ross is a master of the formal portrait, exquisitely executed with astonishing emotional clarity, as if she could see straight into the innermost lives of the earnest schoolchildren and tormented teenagers, the ennobled gas station attendants and car rental reps, along with veterans, senators, mourners and protesters, most of them in the United States, most of them not far from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the former coal-mining town where she was born and raised.”
—Rebecca Bengal, Aperture
