Dana Cupkova

Associate Professor, Architecture

Bio

Previously an Assistant Professor, Dana Cupkova holds Associate Professorship at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and is a co-founder and design 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. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of ACADIA and is Track Chair of SoA’s Masters of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program.

Education

• Professional degree of Engineer Architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
• Completed her thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
• 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.

Research

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.

Projects

Dana Cupkova teaches in the core design curriculum, serving as a coordinator for the undergraduate and graduate core design studio Environment, Form, and Feedback, as well teaching advanced option studios, graduate design-research thesis in MSSD and graduate-level research seminars. She is also the co-founder and design director of EPIPHYTE Lab.

Publications

Cupkova's 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 and presented at many academic conferences.