Zoë Ryan

Zoë Ryan joins us for a lecture at 6:30 p.m. at The Lois Chiles Studio Theater at Moody Center for the Arts. 

Response: Alison Weaver, Director, Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A curator and author, her projects focus on exploring the impact of architecture and design on society. In September 2017, she opened Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute, a major new installation of the modern and contemporary architecture and design collections at the museum. She also released As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History, the first publication to explore in depth the important role that exhibitions have played in the history of these fields of practice. 

Her past exhibitions include: Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye (2015), Fashioning the Object: Bless, Boudicca, and Sandra Backlund (2012), and Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (2011). In 2014, she was the curator of the second Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be. Ryan has taught graduate seminars on design history and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the Design Trust International Advisory Council, Hong Kong. 

Futures of the Architectural Exhibition is a Rice University Humanities Research Center (HRC) Masterclass supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Rice University Arts Initiative Fund.

The Futures of the Architectural Exhibition Lecture Series is organized by Reto Geiser, associate professor of architecture at Rice University, and Michael Kubo, assistant professor of architectural history, theory, and criticism at the University of Houston.