Chazzten Pettiford ​​’22 (MFA1)

The First Recipient of an Award from NYSID’s Diversity Scholarship Fund 

Chazzten Pettiford, a former advertising director who has finally realized her childhood dream of becoming an interior designer, became the first recipient of an award from NYSID’s Diversity Scholarship Fund in 2020, thanks to the generosity of the fund’s first corporate sponsor, Holland & Sherry. She received the Holland & Sherry Diversity in Design Scholarship again in 2021. Pettiford’s perspective in studios and classrooms has the secondary benefit of educating her peers, because she has a deep interest in the history of overlooked African American designers and architects. Pettiford remembers, “When I was young, my mom brought me into her passion for interior design. North Carolina, especially High Point, is known for its furniture making tradition. My mom would take me with her on weekend trips to furniture stores, fabric warehouses and factories.” Despite her early exposure to interior design, it took many years for Pettiford to find her way back to it. As an undergrad at Howard University, she majored in journalism with a focus in advertising, and minored in interior design. She then worked for nine years in the field of corporate advertising, working her way from an assistant to a director at Mediacom. However, interior design was always her passion. She finally took the leap and applied to NYSID to launch a second career. 

“Studying as an undergrad at a HBCU (historically Black college and university), I gained the confidence to express my own style in a room full of uniquely creative people. Howard and its teachers empowered me to be myself as a designer,” Pettiford says. “We studied some more contemporary African American Designers, like Sheila Bridges, but it was here at NYSID where I wrote my first term paper on a historical African American designer. In Warren Ashworth’s Modern Architecture and Design course, he asked us to write about a historical designer or architect who was not white. I chose Amaza Lee Meredith, a biracial woman whose mother was African American and whose father was a white architect in Jim Crow-era Virginia. Her gender and race prevented her from entering architecture school, so she studied to be a teacher, eventually attending Columbia Teachers College and teaching art and design at Virginia State University. Her most notable structure was her own home, Azurest South, built in 1939, based on international design and the Bauhaus movement. It’s so different from the colonial style of Virginia and so interesting.”

The scholarship made it possible for Pettiford to focus on her studies, even during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when all students had to study from home. She recalls, “The scholarship made it possible for me to afford the technology I needed to distance learn during the height of the pandemic, and it took some of the financial burden away so I could prioritize my education. It’s also meaningful to me that I won the Holland & Sherry Diversity in Design Scholarship. I’m thankful that companies like Holland & Sherry have stepped up to amplify and multiply voices of color in interior design.”