Commissioner Vaughn is a landscape designer and accessibility specialist at Sasaki, PhD candidate and educator at UCLA, and founder of Design with Disabled People Now. As a late-Deafened woman who grew up without access to sign language and joined the Deaf community later in life, she is a fierce advocate: she recognizes the importance of celebrating and honoring lived experience as a form of expertise. As a scholar-practitioner, she bridges the gap between research and practice in critical disability studies and the built environment. As an expert in designing with and for the Deaf and disabled communities, she works to go beyond minimal compliance across the design process, in a variety of project types and scales. She was born and raised in Greater Los Angeles and holds both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.