Honoring SEGD Board Member Dayton Schroeter: 2025 TEA Catalyst Award Recipient

With great pride, we celebrate SEGD Board Member Dayton Schroeter for being honored with the 2025 TEA Catalyst Award. Presented by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), this prestigious accolade recognizes individuals who lead through design to create meaningful, transformative, and lasting change across the industry.

Dayton’s recognition as a Catalyst Award recipient honors a career rooted in Design Justice—using architecture, storytelling, and spatial design to confront historical trauma, empower communities, and spark dialogue around equity and inclusion.

SEGD Board Member Dayton Schroeter receives the 2025 TEA Catalyst Award
Design has the power to confront trauma, build resilience, and amplify the voices of the voiceless. We need to create spaces that are grounded in the lived experiences of the people who use them.
Daytron Schroeter, SEGD President, Vice President & National Design Director, SmithGroup

About the TEA Catalyst Award

Launched in 2021 during a period of deep reflection and cultural reckoning, the TEA Catalyst Award spotlights individuals or organizations that challenge the status quo, broaden our collective lens, and create new, inclusive futures in themed entertainment and design.

As shared by the Catalyst Committee Chair:

“The responsibility of putting a spotlight on change agents—hidden figures who aim forward by inspiring viable paths in our industry for future generations of thinkers and dreamers—was clear. We will always need leaders of vision, individuals who will take risks and challenge us.”

Dayton Schroeter embodies that vision.

  1. “The Culture: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Baltimore Museum of Art

    Photo Credit: Mitro Hood/Baltimore Museum of Art

Recognizing Leadership in Design Justice

Dayton is Vice President and National Design Director at SmithGroup, where he has led a critical body of work rooted in social impact, community empowerment, and historical truth-telling. Through his leadership of the firm’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee, he has helped embed equity and advocacy across all levels of SmithGroup’s design practice.

His portfolio includes a range of projects that confront systemic injustice while honoring lived histories:

  • The Richmond National Slavery Museum at Lumpkin’s Slave Jail—a project dedicated to truth-telling on one of the most emotionally and historically complex sites in the U.S.
  • The Whitney Plantation Interpretive Master Plan expands narratives around slavery and resilience through community-informed storytelling.
  • The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Expansion and Renovation, integrating equity-driven design within one of the country’s leading art institutions.
  • The interpretive plan for 1315 Duke Street, the historic headquarters of the largest domestic slave trading firm in the U.S., transforms a site of trauma into a space of education and reckoning.
  • The self-initiated installation Society’s Cage, a traveling public artwork that visualizes 400 years of anti-Black state violence and creates space for protest and reflection.
  • “The Culture: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” a groundbreaking exhibition launched at the Baltimore Museum of Art for hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, exploring the genre’s impact through immersive design, fashion, art, and politics.
  • The Sweatt v. Painter commemorative project at the University of Texas at Austin, honoring a landmark case in the fight for educational equity.

His work continues to shape how we think about space, memory, equity, and collective healing.

  1. Washington DC National Mall installation, facing the Capitol; Society’s Cage; Image by Alan Karchmer

  2. Monument’s interpretive apron; Society’s Cage; Image by Alan Karchmer


  3. Tulsa Centennial of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Children of Tulsa. Photo by Dayton Schroeter

About Society’s Cage

First exhibited on the National Mall in the summer of 2020, Society’s Cage is a nationally recognized, self-initiated public installation led by Dayton Schroeter. The 15-foot by 15-foot interpretive pavilion contextualizes contemporary police violence against Black Americans within a 400-year history of racialized state violence. Nearly 500 suspended steel rods visualize data on mass incarceration, lynching, capital punishment, and civilian killings by police—creating a powerful space for protest, reflection, and change.

The project has since traveled to cities including Baltimore and Tulsa and has become a catalyst for national conversations around racial justice and public memory. In 2022, Society’s Cage received two SEGD Global Design Awards: an Honor Award and the coveted Sylvia Harris Award, which recognizes work that exemplifies an unerring commitment to improving the civic experience.

  1. SEGD Racial Justice Committee Leaders and Board Members Aki Carter (left) and Dayton Schroeter (right), awarding their client NMAAHC the SEGD Achievement Award, 2023 Insight Award

SEGD Leadership and Racial Justice Advocacy

Dayton has served on the SEGD Board of Directors since 2021 and is a dedicated member of SEGD’s Racial Justice Commission (RJC). Through this work, he helps guide SEGD’s ongoing efforts to increase diversity and representation in membership, program participation, and awards—and to hold space for equity through data, transparency, and systemic change.

A Visionary Honored

The TEA Catalyst Committee praised Dayton as “an extraordinary individual reshaping our business and us in his vision,” whose work “has achieved real and positive impact in the creation of compelling places and experiences.”

SEGD is honored to have Dayton’s leadership and vision helping to shape our community.

Congratulations, Dayton, on this well-deserved recognition!

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