Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture

Misri Patel is the recipient of the 2023-25 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. She is an architect and researcher from Mumbai, India. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, she served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her pedagogical interests focus on material systems, computational design, acoustics, additive manufacturing and traditional-advanced fabrication methods. In 2019, she received the Ballard Fellowship at Lawrence Technological University and served as a Research Lead at Taubman College on Long Range Glass. In 2022, the project won the R+D Award from Architect Magazine. Her work has been published in Unfolded, Portico, ideasforward-24H, ACSA, Acadia Conference Proceedings and exhibited at the Venice Biennale, DigitalFUTURES conference and the Center for Architecture, New York. Misri received a Bachelor of Architecture from NMIMS BSSA in Mumbai and a Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies from Taubman College, University of Michigan. Prior to her teaching appointments, she gained professional experience at the offices of Sameep Padora, Mumbai and LOT-EK, New York, and shadowed at Perkins and Will, Los Angeles.

Tuliza Sindi is the recipient of the 2023-25 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. She is an architecture educator, researcher and practitioner based between the U.S. and South Africa. She founded the masters design-research studio Unit 19 (2020-22) at the University of Johannesburg's Graduate School of Architecture (GSA). Tuliza retires design approaches to “land,” to work with the “ground” as a calendar and architecture as its metronome within the framework of chronopolitics and property regimes. In 2022, she co-founded cross-disciplinary architecture collective room19isaFactory. with three Unit 19 graduates. Through what they call the practice of “Quiet Architecture” (with “Quiet” as defined by Prof. Tina Campt in her 2017 book, Listening to Images, referring to the practice of performing the future now), the collective speculates about liberating the ground from chronopolitical captivity through myth- and culture-making, toward deriving alternate spatial futures.

Tommy CheeMou Yang was the recipient of the school’s 2021-23 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture. His research and creative practice focus on bridging the disciplines of architecture, cartography and humanities through storytelling and spatial ethnography. He focuses on how cities adapt and change over time through fieldwork, public history and multi-scale analysis. This has included embedded research on Hmong refugees re-making their homes in Milwaukee, Thai villagers maintaining their worlds within the rapidly urbanizing city of Chiang Mai, and the morphogenetic growth of immigrant communities in New York. Tommy received his professional Master of Architecture degree from Parsons the New School of Design with distinction and is a recipient of multiple awards and fellowships.

Kyriaki Goti is an architectural designer and educator based in New York City. She is the founder of the design studio SomePeople, which focuses on the integration of emerging technologies in architectural design and construction. She has previously taught at Pratt Institute and New York Institute of Technology. She received her MSc in Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research (ITECH) from the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) at the University of Stuttgart and a Diploma in Architecture from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her work has received several international awards, such as the AZ Award 2018 for Design Excellence and the MAD Travel Fellowship 2017. Her projects have been exhibited at ACADIA 2018, LA Design Festival 2019, Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2019 and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2019. Her work and writing have been published in ARCHITECT Magazine, Domus Web, CLOG and Frame magazine.

Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García co-taught first-year studio with professor Mary-Lou Arscott in fall 2019, and taught an ASO studio entitled Hardcorist Lectores, and their Worldmaking Laboratories and spring seminar in spring 2020. They also delivered a lecture during the school’s Fall 2019 Lecture Series, and presented an exhibition in spring 2020. Frankowski and García are co-founding directors of WAI Architecture Think Tank, an international studio practicing architecture from a panoramic approach, the art collective García Frankowski, and founding curators of Beijing-based experimental art and discourse laboratory Intelligentsia Gallery. Educators searching for critical pedagogies, Frankowski and García are former Hyde Chairs of Excellence in Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Visiting Teaching Fellows at The School of Architecture at Taliesin (former Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture).

As the 2018-19 recipient of the Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture, Heather Bizon taught as part of Dana Cupkova’s third year studio team in the fall 2018 semester. In spring 2019, she ran her own ASOS (Advanced Synthesis Option Studio) titled “Identity + Making: The American Mash-Up.” She also delivered a lecture during the School of Architecture’s Fall 2018 Lecture Series. Heather is an artist and architect working in New Haven, Connecticut. Her works explore the individual's perception of space and public/private domains through new media and technology, sculpture, architecture and film. She has worked with MOS architects collaborating on projects of a range of scales from film to landscape to exhibitions to public works, including PS1 Young Architect's Pavilion 2009, Ordos 100 House in Mongolia Lot 006, and Marfa Drive In and Park. She received her B.Arch from Cornell University and M.Arch II from Yale University.

As the 2017-18 recipient of the Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture, Sarah Rafson developed a long-term strategy for disseminating the work of the school and produced the first volume of a new publication for the school titled EX-CHANGE. She also curated the school's spring 2018 NAAB exhibition. Sarah is an architecture writer, researcher, editor and curator. She is the founder of Point Line Projects, an editorial and curatorial agency. A graduate of the University of Toronto and Columbia University's Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program, Sarah has worked on books with Kenneth Frampton, Bernard Tschumi and Barry Bergdoll, and collaborated on exhibitions at MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Center for Architecture in New York, and the Parsons School of Design. She served on the board of ArchiteXX, the New York-based advocacy group for women in architecture, and writes on a range of issues in architecture and design.

Nida Rehman held the Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Architecture from 2016-17. In 2019, she was appointed Assistant Professor in Resilient Cities and Urban Ecology at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture. She holds a Ph.D. form the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines historical relationships between water infrastructure, unintended ecologies and urban landscapes, focusing on how non-human actors like mosquitoes, water and invasive plants shape and are shaped by cultures of knowledge production and development across urban and global contexts.

Christina Ciardullo has a background in astronomy and philosophy and has held research positions at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture’s Space Architecture Lab and the Habitability Design Center at the NASA Johnson Space Center. In addition to terrestrial practice, including a resilient waterfront development and the Shanghai Planetarium with Ennead Architects, she has consulted in the lunar and martian endeavors of Foster+Partners and is founding member of SEArch, a consortium of architects designing for habitats for life in other atmospheres.

Gregory Thomas Spaw is a designer, educator and entrepreneur. Concurrent with his engagement as a principal of SHO, Spaw is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. He has previously served as a visiting professor at the Cracow University of Technology, and taught undergraduate and graduate studios, seminars and electives at the University of Tennessee. His previous professional experience includes stints with the award winning offices of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and Preston Scott Cohen Inc., as well as Asymptote in the UAE. In addition, he contributed to !ndie Architecture’s entry for the PS1 Young Architects Program Competition in Queens, New York and worked on location in Seoul, Athens and Brussels with LA.S.S.A on a series of diverse projects. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.