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

She is Director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture, co-director of the architecture research and design studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina, and Visiting Faculty in Architecture at the California College of Art. 

She is currently: 

+ co-curating Ecologies of Care with Rosario Talevi. Building upon an 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. 

+ mentoring SOM Foundation 2021-22 Fellows Viridiana Hernandez Sevilla, Corey Norman, Temi Osanyintolu, Daniella Slowik, and Kenya Steward through the Robert L. Wesley Mentorship Program. 

+ participating as an emerging scholar in American Council of Learned Society Intention Foundry, an incubator fostering new partnerships, encouraging creative speculation, and supporting collaborative problem-solving to pilot and implement initiatives to achieve a more equitable, inclusive, and just academy. 

+ presenting recent research on on architectural theories of mind, including problem-solving and intuition, and architectural models at the Doctoral Colloquium organized by gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich in Fall 2021.