The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Dana Cupkova has been promoted to Associate Professor and awarded indefinite tenure with the school, effective July 1, 2019.
Cupkova previously held an Assistant Professorship at the SoA. She is a Co-founder and Director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative. From 2005 to 2012 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cornell University Department of Architecture. From 2014 to 2018 she served on the ACADIA Board of Directors and currently she is on the Editorial Board for the IJAC. Cupkova is Track Chair of the SoA’s Masters of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program.
“Dana’s visionary work exemplifies a critical design thinking that architects with global impact engage in the face of a rapidly changing discipline,” said SoA Professor & Head Steve Lee. “Her work moves seamlessly between computational design, new materials, simulation, and form making. No risk is too great for her to undertake – she is courageous.”
Cupkova's design work engages the built environment at the intersection of ecology, computationally driven processes, and systems analysis. In her research, she interrogates the relationship between design-space and ecology as it engages computational methods, thermodynamic processes, and experimentation with geometrically driven performance logic. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the AIA NY Center for Architecture Foundation, the Cornell University Faculty Innovation in Teaching Grant, the Architectural League of New York, the AIA Urban and Regional Solution Grant, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance Grant, CMU's Manufacturing Futures Infinitive, and others. Cupkova's award-winning design work has been published internationally in professional venues such as Dwell, The Architectural Review, Green Building & Design, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Architect's Newspaper, International Journal of Architectural Computing. She has presented at, led, and/or keynoted many academic conferences such as ACSA, ACADIA, SimAUD, and LASG (Living Architecture System Group), among others.
In May 2018, EPIPHYTE Lab was recognized as the Next Progressives design practice by ARCHITECT Magazine, The Journal of The American Institute of Architects. Most recently, Cupkova was awarded the 2019 ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence for her impact as an educator leading the integration of digital technologies, experimental methodologies, and ecological approaches in architectural education.
Cupkova received the professional graduate degree of Engineer Architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava; she completed her thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and holds a Master of Architecture degree from the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA, where she was awarded the Unrestricted University Fellowship, the Mimi Perloff Award, and the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship for outstanding design work. Cupkova was a founder and design director of DCm-STUDIO, an architectural design practice in New York City, and has extensive international professional experience in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia. She was previously in practice with Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects, RUR Architecture in New York City, and TR Hamzah & Yeang in Malaysia.