Catty Dan Zhang is an associate professor of architecture and the founder of Temporary Office. Her work concerns architecture, culture and environment through design and digital media. Using air, smoke, images, and objects as key materials, she creates active atmospheres that enable architecture’s mobile relationships with its users and with the planet. Zhang has practiced in the US and Asia. She has won international competitions, grants, and design awards, and has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at ‘T’ Space, A+D Museum, A83, UC Berkeley, Florida Atlantic University, London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, Harvard GSD, and so on. She was a finalist of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021. She authored Pamphlet Architecture 37, Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids (Steven Myron Holl Foundation, 2023). Zhang recently taught at University of North Carolina at Charlotte as a tenure-track faculty during 2017-2023. Zhang earned a BArch from Tsinghua University, an MArch with Honors from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MDes in Technology from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she was the 2017 recipient of the Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability.

Bachelor of Architecture, Tsinghua University
Master of Design Studies, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Master of Architecture, Washington University