Jia Yi Gu is an architectural historian, educator, and curator who works on, thinks about, and occasionally writes about minor institutional spaces, ethics of care, and media-based practices in architecture.

She is currently Director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture. From 2015-2020, she served as Executive Director of Materials & Applications, a Los Angeles based project space for experimental architecture. In 2016, she co-founded the architecture research and design studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina. She is a PhD candidate in Architecture History at UCLA and is Visiting Faculty in Architecture at the California College of Art.

She is currently...

+ co-curating Ecologies of Care with Rosario Talevi. Building upon this expansive definition of care as an interspecies and planetary process, Ecologies of Care brings together an interdisciplinary group of participants in art, architecture, media and technology studies to co-produce a spatial and situational environment in Fall 2022.

+ teaching the undergraduate and graduate seminar Practicing Care: Ethics, Labor, and Representation, a survey of contemporary conversations on the ethics of care in art, architecture, culture, and environments, at the California College of Art, Spring 2021.

+ co-organizing with Dark Matter University, a democratic network of architecture and design educators dedicated to anti-racist pedagogies.

+ co-organizing Method Acts with Jonah Rowan and Jessica Varner, a series of virtual workshops by Society of Architectural Historians focused on scholarly techniques for graduate students and emerging scholars in architectural history and adjacent fields. 

+ presenting her research at SAH Montreal in March 2021 “Cardboard Knowledge: Problem Solving and Perception in Saarinen's TWA Simulations” in the panel Utopias of the Self. Session chairs: Victoria Bugge Øye, Princeton University, and Larry Busbea, University of Arizona.

+ presenting her work at the Doctoral Colloquium organized by gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich in Fall 2021.