Current Fellows
Architecture Fellows
Olaia Chivite Amigo is a Spanish-Venezuelan architect, researcher, and educator. Her work uses graphic representation and mixed media techniques to develop spatial narratives that highlight how regulatory frameworks, intentions, or formal procedures shift or adapt through the continuous negotiation between public and private stakeholders, citizens, and users.
Ryan Ball is an architect and educator. His research focuses on issues of materiality, detailing, and performance embedded in methods of industrial production in architecture and the built environment. His pedagogy seeks to demystify the often unapproachable topic of building systems. Through the juxtaposition of familiar icons of postwar American suburbia, such as processed foods, losing sports teams, and pristine lawns, his teaching seeks to leverage participatory art practice techniques and examine the US cultural relationship with technology, labor, and class.
Stratton Coffman uses the multi-facing tools of architecture to explore how capital, institutions, and design discourses conspire to produce material, social, and epistemic bodies. They are co-instigator of the architecture research and design working group Proof of Concept with Isadora Dannin. They hold a BA from Wesleyan University and M.Arch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they received the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal.
Alina Nazmeeva is a graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT (2019); a fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design (2017), and a Canadian Centre of Architecture fellow (2022). She was a lead researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives Lab, working on design for physical and digital spaces for emerging collectives, and a researcher at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, studying the economies of virtual worlds and prototyping urban-scale digital twins. She taught at Rhode Island School of Design and Boston Architecture College.
Fishman Fellow
Anna Mascorella serves as the Fishman Fellow and as a co-investigator on the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis. Mascorella is an architectural historian and curator. Her work examines the intersection of politics, class, race, and the built environment. Her current book project, Restore, Displace, Appropriate: Confronting the Baroque in Fascist Rome, examines how Italy’s Fascist regime negotiated the architectural, sociocultural, and colonial legacies of the Baroque during its redesign of Rome.
Michigan-Mellon Design Fellow
Salam Rida is responsible for the development of the ArcPrep curriculum; administration of the Michigan Research Studio and digital dissemination platforms; coordination of graduate teaching assistants and invited faculty; and among other outreach activities. Rida’s research and practice, situated at the intersection of the architecture and urban design, explores multidisciplinary approaches to tactical interventionism, environment sustainability, and equitable economic development.
Michigan Society of Fellows Fellow
Vyta Pivo is a Michigan Society of Fellows fellow in architecture. She is a postdoctoral scholar and assistant professor specializing in architectural and urban history, environmental studies, and the U.S. in a global context. Her current project, The Gospel of Concrete: American Infrastructure and Global Power, documents the global ambitions of the U.S. cement and concrete industries along with the environmental and social consequences of their unfettered expansion.