Darell Fields is a distinguished designer and scholar. He has taught design, urbanism and theory at several universities, including the University of Texas at Arlington, Harvard Graduate School of Design, California College of the Arts (San Francisco), University of California Berkeley, and Princeton University School of Architecture. His design/artistic work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art (New York), the Studio Museum in Harlem, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture (Pittsburg), CentralTrak (Dallas), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Princeton University School of Architecture.

In 2015 he published the book, Architecture in Black: Theory, Space and Appearance. The pioneering text posits a Black, formal (spatial) syntax derived from traditional narrative structures. Black Formalism signifies a specific moment in aesthetic time where Blackness challenges historical negation by perceiving, synthesizing, and projecting spatial systems for its own (Black) purposes. In 2006 he designed alterations and additions to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Darell’s most recent accomplishments include the award winning Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center at the University of Oregon (w ABC Portland); the 2020 Kassler Lecture/Exhibition, On Solitude, for the Princeton University School of Architecture; a participant in Model Behavior, an exhibition at The Cooper Union; and guest editor of Log 57, “Black is … an’ Black ain’t,” demonstrating Blackness as Pedagogy.